The Banks Are Here — JPMorgan Just Made Bitcoin Collateral

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 that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Final Settlement. This was an exciting and action-packed episode. No shortage of M&A deals and new products and releases in the ecosystem. Quick word from on Ramp, an on ramp business specifically, I'm not sure we've had a chance to share it here. We launched this a few weeks ago, incredibly excited about the product. We announced a case study with a large firm but also really foundational infrastructure needed for businesses across the landscape that are adopting Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset. Not only is multi institution a superior way to custody the underlying than trusting a single custodian, but then naturally what's existed or what hasn't existed in the digital asset Bitcoin world is governance, access based controls and everything that generally exists in the traditional financial system has not been ported over when it comes to just treasury management of the underlying Bitcoin. And so with honor and business institutions, enterprises get access to multiple users. They get access to creating quorum of quorum so they can decide on who has access to check off or approve a transaction before the withdrawal takes place. And then you get complete audit controls as well as multiple wallets, different quorums, everything that a large scale institution would need. I'm really excited about this announcement. We're starting to onboard publicly traded companies as well as other large institutions. If you want to learn more, I'd encourage you to book a consultation or reach out. All right, on to the episode. I hope you guys enjoy. All righty boys, we are back. The banks are here. It's another episode of Final SETTLEMENT. Today is Monday, October 27th, 10:15 AM Eastern Time. Joined as always by Liam Nelson, Michael Tanguma. Boys, how are we doing? Big list today. Huge list. We're doing good with the, the energy you're you're bringing because we've heard feedback from, you know, listeners and peers in the space and you know, Jackson, they love him, but he comes in a little, little slow and warms up and you know it, it gets the, the juices flowing when you, you kick us off like that you. Got to bring the juices. It's Monday morning. The banks are here. They want your corn. They also want stable coins. For your guys's time in the space, when are your like most enjoyed pumps? I have two that come to mind. This ties into this is Sunday nights are always great going into Monday, but I really think the favorite from, you know, from the past whatever 810 years is Friday. Yeah, we got the opposite a few weeks ago, but yeah, the Friday evening right into market close I think are the best pumps. It doesn't even matter what day of the week, it's just like when you wake up at 3:00 AM and need to pee or something and then like accidentally check your phone and it's up like 3000 more dollars than when you went to bed. Those are just the best feelings, no? But there's there's a day, everyone has the day there. There's a certain vibe because the one that I'll describe is Friday after work. I remember specifically being New York City and happy hours happening and the price is just like ripping and nobody has any idea what's going on. You're just sitting there by yourself and you may have had a couple cocktails and the price is just like running. And this would happen every so often in like 2018, nineteen, I think. And it's just Friday afternoon because you're going into the weekend. You just, you know, you're becoming wealthier. I don't know. That's it's the it's the meme of the guy in the party at the corner. No one knows that Bitcoin's price is ripping. And it's just moving on your phone. It's just like this thing that's it's it's a it's a thing. It's a thing. But Liam three M rips 3 M pisses ripping pisses at any day of the night. He's he's agnostic to win the price pumps. Always a good time for a price pump. That is true. As I said, big list, we're going to get into it. We're going to start with JP Morgan. I said the banks are coming, they are here and they're going to let clients pledge BTC and Ethereum as loan collateral by year end. It's almost your end. We're end of October here. So this is the next two months they're going to let Bitcoin be collateral and this is a pretty big news for a number of reasons. Three different ways we can unpack this. The first one to me is just, you know, if you think about what is deemed collateral and asset classes moving into, you know, reserve status or being used as collateral, you have different sort of epochs of things being used as collateral. You could look at, you know pre 1971 as gold, you know, predominantly being used as a form of collateral, neutral reserve, etcetera. And then, you know, post 1971, you really move towards U.S. Treasuries as the default form of collateral. And you could also say in that time period that real estate was a predominant form of capital or collateral. And now we're adding basically a new asset to the mix of acceptable collateral, which is a pretty big deal just again in the sort of timeline of asset progression, asset development and use as collateral. And so we're, you know, very early stages, as early as you can possibly be in terms of this, this new asset class being deemed worthy of being collateral. So what are you guys thoughts on this? Yeah, I mean, this one is is huge. It's even even you just sharing the collateral notion makes me think it's so much bigger. I won't go in any direct order. But you know, having talked with banks, regional banks, they see stablecoins as a big disruptor and they want to get in the game. And I think it's a little bit of a misnomer, misguided view. I think that they have to at best be in parallel looked at as priorities because on the traditional banking like 2 dimensional take is they're going to see capital flight, it's better money movement, cross-border, all the things. And I know that's true. But the reality is most people, most banking institutions do not like from a retail even business perspective, they still have to get trained up on how to use stable coins. So that's still years away versus if they're looking for Bitcoin exposure. We've seen what the ETFs have done. You should open up turn on the ability not only to trade, but I'll also actively custody get closest to that underline, which is that collateral we're talking about. And now you can start to offer whether it's Bitcoin back loans, which you know, obviously banks are the the the game of lending money cross collateralization. So I think this is big because it shows another layer of not risk, but potential disruption that the big banks have already been disrupting and dissing, remediating the regional banks. So there there's that. I think huge from just Jamie Dimon being one of the largest, you know, and JP Morgan in financial institutions, the world to basically dismiss, yeah, call it Tulip bulbs and ultimately come back and get involved. And then there's also the example of I think that they're going to let you do both when it comes to pledging your ETF shares as well as the underlying, which is really fascinating because I think the if there was just ETF shares, I'd be a little bit less interested or think it's so, you know, groundbreaking. But the fact that they're going to get in the game of the underlying and figure out the underlying custody have to figure out, you know, the rest of that. And it shows also that they're like competing with deposits, they're competing with the underlying custody. They get that they want to be right next to it and offer financial services. The last part I'll say though, is all it is great. And also kind of is, I don't want to say it doesn't matter, but you got to be very wary because for 15 years people have tried to lend against Bitcoin and they pretty much blown up. Now obviously JP Morgan Chase is different, but I just think that it's very, it's worth sharing that when anybody drops a new product in this space, you really want to take a step back and just see what happens, how it works, especially with something that is historically not worked well for the lender because this stuff is truly alien technology. I forgot I was talking to you about it last. It was actually a large bank and one of the largest banks in the country and I was referencing these are interested in MIC. It was explaining like this is alien technology in the sense that it trades 24/7. If you look at all the volatile periods they happen at these nights and weekends, Thanksgiving night when we used to run our lending desk and chain, those were always the most volatile as a running joke on Thanksgiving, you were just stuck near the near the computer and then you have this asset that can go from 20 to 3040% drawdowns that you're not used to on a 24/7 market. And then you have if you're caught short or naked, there's no bailouts. It's just a different ball game. And so TBD how it plays out for JP Morgan Chase. Yeah, I think that there's a ton here. One, everybody's going to come kicking and screaming just because the market forces will demand it. We've seen how profitable the ETFs have been, and the clients just demand it. They want to be able to trade Bitcoin and Bitcoin ETFs. They're they've definitely done this. Not because Jamie Dimon is, you know, spearheading this internally and super excited about it. And he just, you know, one sees that the clients are going to go somewhere else if they can't do it themselves. A lot of these hedge funds will trade on margin. And so they want to lever up their actual amounts of trade. And so that's not to say they're going to, you know, put, you know, out of all their portfolio 500% long Bitcoin, it's going to be like a relatively small percent of their portfolio. And they'll trade against, you know, future expectations of where the market's headed, yadda, yadda, yadda. But as you've seen, everything from the popularity of the ETFs, the amount of, you know, clients that have got exposure to Bitcoin for the first time through the ETFs and a lot of them probably are starting to get smarter on it. It's it's become a larger percentage of their portfolio and, and they dip their toes in what was it January of last year now, and they've gotten more comfortable with the asset and they want the underlying themselves. It's just the the perfect example of every detractor that doesn't want Bitcoin. They think it's a scam until they can actually make money from it. And they're they're going to be educated from their clients or their clients are just going to leave. But because JP Morgan's so big and they can have such a big balance sheet to lend against, people are going to want to work with them. It's just a massive just move for the industry. And but the last thing that I will say, I am impressed with how quickly they're getting to market. I doubt that they're going to use a custodian themselves. I would imagine it's probably a sub custodian, but they can offer a very big lending book that they combined against. So it'll be interesting to see how much adoption this gets early on. I don't think it will be just, I mean it'll be massive in, in Bitcoin terms, but it'll probably be relatively small as people want to check out how this actually works to your point, Michael as well. Yeah, agree with all of that. I think very good points around just the narrative, the bending of the knee. You watch the ETFs have such great success, you see Black Rock, it's their most, you know, profit generating product at this point in time. And you can't just ignore that. And and you know, we've also discussed the past few weeks around this idea that, you know, whether it's OG whales or just people moving into these ETF products due to security concerns or the ability to, to get margin against, I bet shares. This is a natural competitive sort of move or pivot for the JP Morgan's of the world to say. Well, to your point exactly, Michael, let's get let's just get closer to the underlying and do very similar financial services around the asset, but in a way that is not in a in a rapper vehicle. Now the interesting question is, you know, how they how are they going to actually go about building out custody themselves or acquiring it using a sub custodian like you referenced? And maybe that's a nice transition to another headline from the past week, which relates to, you know, effectively single custodians and this notion of the big boys are here, the banks are stepping in. You know, we we've seen things like this in the past in terms of certain entities or trust companies being deemed, quote UN quote, qualified custodians being trusted to custody digital assets. But ultimately, you know, being a single custodian brings a lot of risks in terms of having single points of failure and the ability for things to go wrong without fault tolerance and without fall backs in place. And so I think it's relates pretty closely to to this news from Nevada shutting down Fortress Trust over insolvency. Now if you recall a few years ago, I believe this is, you know, some of the same management team, if not the same management team from Prime Trust that went insolvent a few years back, lost 80 million in client funds. Michael, maybe I'll kick this one to you. Thoughts on on this announcement or this development because this has sort of been happening in in slow motion over the past couple years? Yeah, this unfortunately has. I didn't even. I was kind of surprised that they were still around. I guess they had still been some in some way operating, operating. This whole situation stinks. If anybody's been close to the industry, you can search on Twitter and probably back into not only what happened with Fortress. I didn't know it was as big as 80 million in the losses. And then ultimately some of the executive team that went over to I'm sorry at Prime and then went over to Fortress. The real nasty part about the Prime and Fortress is there's a bunch of companies that back in the day when those come, when the assets were lost, understood that knew before the market did. They actually took assets off of them because Prime Trust used to be a custodian for a large percentage of the Bitcoin only firms. And then ultimately now there's lawsuits out there around clawbacks because it's been understood. You can just track them the movement, whether it's the blockchain or the ledgers that they use on capital leading from their sub custodial relationships with Prime Trust and Fortress Trust. And now there's a bunch of clients holding the bag. Included on top of that is when you look at your IRA custodian. And then naturally, there's been a stain when it comes to sub custodial arrangements in the IRA space because certain assets were stuck there. All is to say this really ties into kind of also what I think, Brian, what you're leading to on the JP Morgan Chase side is kind of feel like sometimes we're taking crazy pills. But we explained that there's a reason on a long enough time horizon, the market will demand multi institution custody. And it really breaks down for this exact reason that once somebody, an institution, an individual gets material amounts of Bitcoin, something that is greater than, you know, speculative exposure, they will naturally demand better assurances for the underlying, whether it's just custody or custody for the underlying loan that they've taken against their Bitcoin. And there's a number of reasons for that from the fact that you can't lose the asset, you cannot move it or lose it in a scenario like that. But also when it comes to if one of the custodians is tied up in some kind of bankruptcy proceedings or anything that you know, would prohibit them from signing or moving the asset, the assets are still OK to be moved depending on the construct. In our current iteration, that's the case because the client remains the title owner of the Bitcoin and then they they're able to direct the agent on behalf of them that is safeguarding that cryptographic material. And so yeah, I think that's just, it's just going to take time, but it's really sad to see. And, and I can almost promise we'll see more of this in the next 24 months as liquidity comes into the space, the need and the the recognition for multi institution will only become more apparent. That's the thing that I think everyone just fundamentally misses and would love to take bets on this is that the liquidity doesn't come in a vacuum. So going from 1:20 to 170 to 250 isn't all, you know, butterflies and rainbows or whatever. It's actual risk will be inserted because it is still the Wild West and people love to do weird stuff because it already they only do weird stuff in the traditional system. It this is exponentially increased once you get into crypto digital assets. And as that happens, that's when the market wakes up to redundant fault tolerant solutions. We're just forgot what happened in 22 and we live in a world that's just traditionally trusting and it just doesn't work that way in digital assets, in Bitcoin. Well said. I think, yeah, I mean, that's that's why many of the people severed the Internet connection and took their assets offline in the very early days because they'd seen so many instances like this. And and there there are those challenges with, you know, taking all of your Bitcoin and offline as well and keeping it on your person. But, you know, the emergence of, you know, bankruptcy, remote accounts and the ability to actually, you know, use a custodian does have benefits as well. So as it's just kind of like the JP Morgan deal and offering collateral on the underlying assets themselves. Enough enough customers that become educated will ultimately demand it and it will just be market forces that push assets from omnibus accounts where you know you can actually be have your assets clawed back in if there's separate bankruptcy to more bankruptcy remote type accounts in the future. Can we go? Or go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Honestly, if we're if we're good with this, I want to go bullish because there's a lot of happenings. I thought we're going to go from JPMC to Zell because that's. That's where I was going next. I'll pull that up right now. So, yeah, so. Go ahead, I was. Just going to say we were, we were looking up before we hit record because I had some understanding of like what Zella is. I've used it before, but it turns out it's owned by a consortium of pretty much all the big banks. So that's just a a noteworthy disclaimer as as we introduce this story and why it's relevant, but go ahead. Yeah, I mean, that was, I didn't know. I have an uncle that works for Wells Fargo and I, I don't remember why I end up digging into this, but there, there was always a weird, I think because he was initially the person I asked for Zelle and I was like, well, that's interesting, download it. But Zelle's fascinating because when you look at the Genesis, it was part of the combating of the fintech apps like the Paypal's, the Venmo's, the cash apps of historically the systems are I think Latin America, Europe has really great when it comes to the interoperability of the banking system where the US is very fractured. And so you'll ultimately end up with these layers on top where these databases like a cash app, Venmo, PayPal that are able to net settle out transactions and via flows and other reasons. Zelle was established, I think maybe close to 10 years ago. But to Brian's point, it was some of the largest banking institutions, the Wells Fargo's, I think U.S. bank, JPMC. And what makes this really interesting, there's another like four others, is that now they're positioning stablecoins for cross-border to start. Which is pretty big because if you have the largest banks getting in that it doesn't say much about like what blockchain. My instincts tell me that it's probably tied to about a couple weeks ago when I think we had called us a few months ago that the large consortiums like this, we're going to establish some kind of stable coin because it just made too much sense from the distribution mechanics. And so anyway, I think this is just a big deal from a directional point of once U.S. citizens get comfortable with the notion of money being digital and they can move it around. And it just ties that connectivity around being able to, you know, swap into BTC that this just is a signal for the industry that it's moving in the direction that you're not going to come back from. You know, it's also going to be very overwhelming because a lot of stuff is going to be, you know, we don't have to go, let's keep it Polish, but it it's not going to end up good if people think stable coins are the innovation. The sad part is, I think most people are actually going to like end up as stable coins are the innovation. I don't think everyone adopts Bitcoin. Started to realize that that's a different conversation. Well, there are two, two links that we have that are related to this too. I don't know if you saw the Western Union news, but it sounds like they're pretty much going all in on Bitcoin. I mean, Western Union or stablecoins, sorry, not Bitcoin. They, they've alluded to having a stablecoin partner, which they haven't actually named their names, but they're just pretty much seems to be focusing on expanding globally beyond on off ramps to stablecoins. It's just going to be, you know, we've talked about this a while for a while now, but it seems like the move is just they're going to just essentially stable coinize the world with U.S. dollars as the intermediary and just making sure that there are different banking partners for all across the world for on and off ramps between these stable coins will be a massive part of that too. It's just going to be increasingly the currency will probably be U.S. dollar, Bitcoin and gold as that ramps up a little bit more and there's just more like money is just essentially data and information at the end of the day, except for maybe gold, which is physical. But as that ramps up, just information wants to be free. And so we're going to see greater currency competition over the next decade or so or even longer. Yeah, the the Western Union deal is particularly interesting to me just because in a, in a prior life, in my in my private banking days, we used to cover a manager that had an allocation to Western Union. It was a sort of a long only equity midcap fund. And this was like 10 years ago now. And in, in sort of our quarterly updates, I would always bring up the fact that like, you know, remittances are, you know, in the process of being disrupted in a real way. At the time, you know, I, I was sort of agnostic to which blockchain would be the real disruptor. But I knew that, you know, from a technological standpoint that, you know, these guys were being disrupted. So, you know, it's, it's interesting to see basically a decade later, they're now actually doing something about it. I guess that's sort of to be expected from an incumbent like Western Union to not see the writing on the wall that's really been there for several years at this point. But yeah, that makes sense that they're, you know, at least finally moving in that direction of realizing that they're going to have to do something in stable coin land if they're going to want to be competitive with all these fintechs, all the banks that are going to basically eat their lunch if they don't do anything about it. All right? We had a slew of sort of more crypto deals if we want to run through some of those, some AM and a some acquisitions. I'm going to start just with this one. Salesforce backed pay tech firm Modern Treasury acquires Beam stablecoin startup for 40 million. I want to be honest, I've never heard of either of these companies. Michael, I think you brought this on the list. Any any thoughts on this one? Yeah, Beam, I hadn't heard of, but modern treasury I have. They're a large kind of they sit like as a middleware between traditional fintechs or like crypto companies and then the back end banking layer. So if you like think about, you have an exchange, you have some type of brokerage business and you need to manage not only your treasury, your capital movement, your cash flow from incoming, but then as individuals are setting up like FBO or accounts with your business, they need API infrastructure to build those accounts. And it all just needs to like talk to each other. So modern charges, pretty big firm, probably multi billion dollar I think. What does it say? Raise 100 and 38183 million. Yeah, $2 billion valuation. And then they just this deal with Beam, which is effectively what is that? Yeah. And so they're part of the Dole, the global dollar consortium, which is with Anchorage. The main idea here is that you're going to start seeing more and more of like what we saw with Stripe Tempo in this integration between start-ups, fintechs and the ability to either leverage existing stable coins or launch your own to manage capital movement. I think the, the, the Western Union stuff is obviously big from cross-border and like that's just self preservation. I think the Zell thing is a little fundamentally different because of the plumbing activity between all these banks. Like those banks probably make up over 50 plus percent of business accounts. You think about, you know, stripes involvement with businesses and then you take something like JPMC, Wells Fargo and the others. And if those individuals have business accounts and business capital, we talked about before Stripe only has 1% of international B to B. What does it look like for the modern treasuries in these other companies? That because that's really where the, the real use case is when you think about from scale and actually operationalizing, like to get every user to learn how to use stables to go and send money and how much money can they send? How much fees can you really take if it's a race to 0 versus if you're a business that is a multinational and you need to net settle from whether it's invoices to payroll, Like that's the real disruption. And I think we're going to start to see more and more of that. And that's really where like Acropolis, A treasury portfolio company, can shine because the notion of putting Bitcoin as that core underlying asset next to stable coins, I think is something that's not historically been done very well. And there's a big opportunity for that. Yeah, Well said that the opportunities there to put them close to each other, I think we're a ways away from some of these folks realizing that. I think they're sort of predominantly focused on stable coins for now. I think they're for the most part missing that second sort of leg of of what you're describing where you need to get close to the Bitcoin as savings and have, you know, stables for spending and and, you know, running a business operationally. So we're probably still ways away from people realizing the the sort of full picture there. I'll go to this one next. Prime broker Falcon X to buy 21 shares amid crypto M and a spree. There was another headline that said crypto M and a surges thirtyfold as niche firm shift to mainstream. Thoughts on this one? I thought that this one was super interesting just because I saw an interview with Ragu, who's the CEO of Falcon Act. She said 20 to 30% of net new entrants into the Bitcoin industry are coming in through ETFs now, which kind of validated a lot of what we're seeing in the space. But also, just like we talked about with JP Morgan, people are going to want some exposure to ETF, some exposure to spot Bitcoin. And we've seen a lot about how the options on the BlackRock ETFs are actually like outpacing options on underlying Bitcoin itself. And so I think it's just going to be Falcon X is doing a lot. That's kind of interesting too, but just the entire stack of, you know, ETFs options on them. And then just the fact that, I mean, these ETFs are just great business models too, because it's a taxable event if you want to actually get out. And so they're going to be able to pretty much charge whatever fee that they want to for a sustained amount of time. They can, they have their own custody that they can move it over to if they want that. And so the this is probably just extremely profitable business model for them. Yeah, I didn't even think about. It's a really great point around, but I don't know how much is took part of it. But like the notion that over long enough time horizon when somebody buys into digital assets, specifically Bitcoin, the realization is you want the underline. There's just going to be a lot more you can do with that and specifically from counterparty risk perspective, right? Like the base. If the base is you can insert governance in a world where you never could, then everything else will be a derivative of that. And the opposite is also to be true, as if the base is fractured, meaning you have a single counterparty with the underlying custody and you create all these derivatives on top. When it unwinds, it's going to be very bloody. With all that said, when somebody first comes in, they're used to buying it in an equity like wrapper, and then you naturally have that conversion over. But then to your point, there's a lot of other things around execution, financial products, derivatives. One thing that I don't know if you had something on that, Brian, but I do want to pull this up because you tied into it, if we want to keep things bullish is this was the Bloomberg article that crypto MNA transactions and the amount in Q3 was close to $10 billion, which is basically I think about AA3X from Q1. I think it's also just getting started. Like I've always find it interesting when you see some of these these raises. I think we saw some of the IP OS and it makes sense, right, Like when you 10 TS of a fund that they really executed well on the thesis that, you know, institutional investors Dan Tapiros fund. They couldn't get exposure to a Bitcoin wasn't their mandate. So the way they would go is investing growth companies that already had some kind of like or definitely a product market fit and they were like pre IPO. So the Gemini's, the ledgers, the Darabitz, they crushed it. But point being is they use this past like 2 quarter window because it looked like the cycle the top right. So you want to like go in and you saw a lot of raises and you've heard like big go IPO. And I think like there you can't, you can't money morning quarterback it because we don't know where the markets going to go. But my instincts tell me they probably like shot the they overshot or they like they shot the gun too early. Basically that we probably 12 to 18 months before that optimal time where there's going to be like insane fervor or froth in the market. And this is a example of it. It's like if this is 10 billion in Q3 where we're heading in 26 because everyone's trying to place their chips on the table with the acquisition so they can get their integration with like what are what are their plans, right? You've heard Wells Fargo coming into space, Citibank's coming into space, you know, Facebook is looking at it. There's always been rumored that Facebook will go back and buy David Marcus to get, you know, spark involved. That it's really the underpinning thesis of everything we're kind of doing here is there's real opportunities to build generational businesses that are stand alone businesses that, you know, effectively print BTC to pass back. But then there's going to be a lots of opportunities for companies all over the world in financial institutions to buy these firms because remember similar with like the audio investment in Latin America, that's a whole region that's going to need financial services. They're not going to buy AUS based firm generally to go and offer services in the same way in the Middle East and Asia Pacific. So I think this is very bullish for the thesis of like these companies are going to have to, there's going to be an insane amount of M&A and it's just getting started. And next year, we'll probably see like 5 to 10 X of what we saw in the last half of this year. Yeah. I think that's, I think that's spot on. I think this is A, and obviously a, a huge jump from what you saw on the screen there in the past years, but that's to be expected. You know, we heard 2-3 years ago there was lots of similar announcements, similar plans in place. And then when everything deleveraged, everyone sort of shelved a lot of those plans. And so it's natural that you saw that dip in activity over the past two years. And I think you're, I think you're exactly there, right, that we're just scratching the surface of what this could look like sort of in the coming, coming months and years even. Because what we do know is that these incumbents, whether the Trat 5 firms or the fintechs, you know, they're more bureaucratic, just generally speaking, they're going to be slower moving. They're putting their plans in place now. They're getting their chips on the table. But it's going to take some time for these things to actually, you know, be in market, be productized. And we'll just have to see how that plays out. But there was another few other deals to run through. Coinbase bought a investment platform called Echo for 375,000,000. This one was particularly interesting or funny just given. So Echo is a investment platform. My understanding is it's sort of like a crowdfunding token launch platform, but sort of more credible. Not anyone can just launch a token within the platform. It sort of has to be vetted and so there's some air of credibility around it. Kobe, who is a crypto Twitter personality, actually started the the platform Echo and he also had a podcast a few years ago called Up Only Coinbase bought the podcast for 25,000,000 prior to announcing this deal. So sort of a little marketing gimmick stunt to buzz interest around what they would announce literally the next day buying Kobe's platform for 375,000,000. Thoughts on this guy's? Yeah, thoughts are generally that Bitcoin dominance is not going higher in the immediate term. I think that, you know, this is a good example of the adults in the room or the perceived adults in the room when looking from the outside. And they're allowing for any company to go out there and raise their own token. And so it's it's just a lot of distraction too. And so you're going to see a lot of just, I mean, I focused on, on distraction rather than just the underlying Bitcoin itself. I don't think that there's going to be, I mean, they're probably going to make a lot of money off of this just because they can put their name on it. And there will be other tokens that they will want to sell. And the market's uneducated for on what's actually creates value over time. And so they'll buy what the perceived adult in the room is willing to put their name next to. But it's just a sign that you know, the market isn't necessarily as quite as developed as as we would all like to say. Yeah, this remind this reminds me a little bit of like there's a truth in every lie in the sense that what they'll probably come back to the pushback I'm about to give on this is small companies and whatever need to raise capital, you know, and get exposure to additional funding mechanisms. But the reality is this is a big point. It's probably the biggest point around the market structure. Bill haven't followed as closely, but our friends at BPI have really good reports and just commentary on what's going on. It really comes down to securities being not deemed commodities by the CFTC and figuring out how do they basically like whitewash all of this and allow things to trade in a more free not be registered as UN or not be recognized as unregistered securities. Coinbase is obviously very close with them. The ability to launch anybody their own token is the kind of a corollary or similar to like whatever the pump dot fund where you can do it like any less scrupulous way, you know, on the blockchain anonymously, whatever. But it also reminds me very similarly of Polymarket and everything's going to become a market and we're just all going to trade around on ideas. It's just this kind of high velocity trash economy where everyone's speculating and we have the piece that I was we were looking at that we're going to release about, you know, investing on a Bitcoin standard and it and it just like kind of is fresh on my mind. When you think about, well, when you have a sound money world, you just hold the underlying, you don't have to put it at risk anymore. And that's the opposite of what these people push. It's more of like here, jump on the platform and then go ahead and let get off to the race on speculating and everyone just ends up with like less money and then definitely less Bitcoin. Yeah, agree with all that. The other take away as it relates to this acquisition in particular is it signals to me that they see, you know, Coinbase sees some real competitive threat vector from like the pump fund platforms of the world where they're basically missing out on the early, the very earliest stages of some of these tokens or projects. And so I think this is really an effort to own that full chain from like ideation, token creation, launch funding all the way to trade, which is what they already own in terms of, you know, when these assets get added to the exchange and then tradable. But it's, it's sort of a signal to me that they see some real competitive threat from the pump pump funds of the world just wanting to own that whole life cycle of, of speculation basically from sort of A-Z. It's and then it's just like the wrong fundamentally strategy in my opinion. I think they're trying to compete with the casinos when there are a number of just institutions who just want to safely hold their Bitcoin and, you know, and even trade around a lot of their Bitcoin and in a serious way and want serious counterparties. And, you know, trying to go too far out on the risk curve is going to push away some of those types of folks. Now they have a great brand name and people generally trust them. And so it's only going to hack on the margins. But I think it's a pretty big missed opportunity. Moving along, this is a late add. Late add to the list. IBM launches digital assets platform As crypto activity jumps I'll pull up the actual press release from IBM here. IBM announces new platform for financial institutions and regulated enterprises entering the digital asset economy. A lot of words salad here, but what, what? What would you make? What would you make of this IBM getting in the game? I wasn't able to look deep here, but I mean, if I could think of a top five list of legacy companies to not touch, you know, Bitcoin, it would be IBM would be up there. A lot of buzzwords, a lot of HS, Ms. hardware, security modules, blockchain, you know, the level of attack surface. I don't know. I mean, yeah, it's it's really interesting because I think about IBM and other firms get into the space and like, you know, relatively speaking, somebody can manage a private key. We see no shortage of different firms launch things. The problem is everyday you hear about different hacks, different vulnerabilities. And the thing I always draft you when we talk with institutions is on a long enough time horizon, you know, as the price runs, liquidity comes, people lose assets, and then ultimately people start to wake up, well, like, well, what's the difference between your custody versus the other? And it all starts to look the same because either A, somebody's not technical enough or B, from an operational security perspective all the way from Coinbase to Fidelity and everyone in between. You can't actually ever tell anybody what you do with the underline because that's, you know, a source of risk and attack vector. And so you never have real transparency, understanding where the asset and also you know, whether it's bad actors from a collusion perspective coming in and infiltrating organization to a long enough standing where any kind of counterparty risk insolvency come to play. You just start to see everyone will step in with HS, NS and multi party computation, all these different ways to custody, but they will lead to vulnerabilities which will have the market feeling, you know, we'll look for standardized processes. So that's what I really come to think about. IB, Ms. first foray into this. It's probably going to be a little interesting. They probably won't get much traction to have any vulnerabilities, but interesting nonetheless. Yeah, we'll see if they come out with anything or if it's just Long Island blockchain iced tea or something like that. And just like, you know, marketing touch. Hey, everybody, hope you're joining the episode. Lots of interesting dialogue going on this week around stablecoins, AI and a lot of the M&A activity that's happening in the industry. Quick word from on rampant specifically around our inheritance product. We have no shortage of net new clients and existing clients that came over to on ramp specifically because of inheritance. We've all been in this current situation where generally Bitcoin is male dominated. Our significant others are perfectly fine with us allocating or even over allocating depending on who you are to the asset. But they also don't want any exposure have to deal with management of private keys, what to do if something happens to the individual harbor devices see phrases all the things that account for self custody. And so while clients sometimes feel perfectly fine with self custody for themselves, it really comes to legacy planning, whether it's with inheritance, the dynasty trust release that we had inheritance comes with every product and every multi institution account included with also insurance Iras and trade. But inheritance is the thing that I want to call out simply because as the price appreciates, as we get older, we start to recognize that we have to legacy plan, We have to be more mature with this asset. And so Onrip really provides Peace of Mind there. Even if you're not necessarily ready for something like Onrip, but you want to learn more how we solve for that and some of the other, you know, financial products we offer as Bitcoin that naturally matures, it needs serious products and solutions. I'd encourage you to book time or you can reach out to me directly, Michael at onripbitcoin.com. We're actually piloting out some flat reduced base pricing that we're testing out this quarter and we'll go into 2026 with. If you'd like to opt into something like that, reach out and we'll share more. All right, hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. Yeah. Should we chat digital asset haven? Should we chat Tether because I feel like there's there's a number of things in you guys share where you want to go. I don't really have a direct one. It's like there was Tether and a lot of the notion that came out this past week. They've been talking about this, but like Tether and AI and just how the models will be created and the things they're doing there. I think the investment they're bringing on to really push USAT. And, and then I don't know if I couldn't understand or not if there's a rumble token that's being launched for creating and tipping because in some of the articles it said RUM as a rumble token. And then the other one was that they invested in a firm which is I think kind of interesting called Pave Bank for kind of like digital, digital banking that I thought it was interesting as well. Yeah, a few different angles to take it. I think the rumble token, yeah, it's it says right here, distribute the upcoming rumble token RUM. The it's it's interesting because when I first saw this headline, I assumed that they were basically trying to turn on, you know, similar to on Noster with zaps like lightning bass tipping. But it seems like there's going to be some meaningless token involves, which is unfortunate. And then, yeah, I'll pull up the other deal, which I mean, if you know, we talk a lot about Tether on the show and generally how they think about capital deployment, their reserves, the advantages they have and, and how they've accumulated that those reserves over time. But they also have an investment arm and, and so it's probably noteworthy to look at anything that they're backing. So I, I had never heard of this pave or paid bank before, but raised 39 million in Series 8 funding by Excel participation from Tether investments, Wintermute and others. Businesses using the bank, which has a license in Georgia, can manage both Fiat and digital assets in real time, automate treasury operations and reduce reliance on intermediaries. So I'm not really sure exactly you know, why Tether would be interested in this business in particular. It seems like they're doing a lot of these things themselves. But curious you guys thoughts on on any of these Tether related headlines? The Pave 1 is interesting because if you go, I'll pull up their site. It kind of makes sense. It reminds me of the other one we talked about which was Dakota dot XYZ. We're going to start to see more of these mix between what we talked about like so modern treasury is like this intermediary platform between the front layer fintech and then the back and banking or multiple banks you manage. And these digital first banks look like banks that offer Ivans and other ways to take in different types of deposits, so multi currency, but then they basically sit between the firm. So it's basically vertically or collapsing. What would be modern treasury is that intermediary management system and then the underlying bank, but then they're digital focus. So then what that really means is robust and more sophisticated APIs, because that's one of the big things with the reason why these fintechs sit in between is because traditional banking APIs are really kind of either they don't exist or they're super, they are super. Unsophisticated is not the right word, but I'll use it because ultimately banks are risk averse and they naturally need to maintain certain levels of security. So they don't open up a lot of infrastructure for usage. And so this is where this limitless banking, you know, pave or pave bank. And so they reference multi asset 24/7 global banking and the programability when you're a digital asset firm, if you're going to be doing either multi currency stable coins or if you think about a lot of like AI companies. If this kind of ties into what I think is probably the full circle of the the stablecoin aspect is stablecoins, willpower, AI, it makes more sense than credit card from an inference and a programmability perspective. You go back full circle and if it ends up being some kind of utility where people need AI tokens for a bunch of things that you'll naturally need in your day-to-day life and kind of rounds out how USAT and Tether are looking to be with the bank. So they invest the bank, they issue the stablecoin. USAT is the distribution channel and then you're, you're able to basically build that into the programability to. However, stablecoins are going to proliferate, whether it's fintechs, AI companies or whatever. So I, I can see it, I think it's going to be interesting to see how far, how long it takes because I don't know how many use cases are yet available for stablecoins that the market understands it will will tolerate. But I think it's naturally coming. It's just when. Yeah. And starting with the digital asset companies makes a lot of sense. I, I'm actually surprised that they haven't gone out and bought a bigger bank at this point. I think that Heather is one of those types of folks that wants to, you know, 1, you get a lot of information if there's information sharing rights on just, you know, the types of customers who's growing really quickly, etcetera, by working with the paved bank. And so that's just like interesting to know what you know, either potential competitors or you know, other folks in the space are really doing that are interesting. That can apply back to your business and just generally how you view the market. But also in a world where I think that they know that the USD isn't going to be around forever just because of everything that's going along with the, the basement of the currency and the they're naturally Bitcoiners and gold bugs as well. And so I'm more surprised that they haven't gone out and tried to either create a Bank of themselves. And so they can actually lend directly to those types of folks and actually have eyes on the underlying asset with their own custody type models for, you know, both Bitcoin and gold, which I would be surprised if we don't see within the next few years. Yeah, 11 interesting example from what I was reading there and it'll make a lot of sense to your point too on the automation of Bitcoin back loans on the like a micro example, I never thought of this, but like when you think about an Unchained, A leaden, an arch, you generally have some kind of minimum because there's operational requirements and you're ultimately originating. And even though like arch is world class at originating, making it pretty straightforward where you can get the liquidity, I think strikes even doing this in some respect, they're still like operational overhead and requirements and collateral management that end up like around the individual level. And you can imagine where in a certain level the wallet has a deposit, you have your stable coins issued and then there's automation tied into, you know, everything around. Again, this isn't necessarily you can build a business around this and it's done. But if a banking layer like this could do is out-of-the-box, you could lend against the underlying leverage of the licenses have a lot of their triggers and permissions around when the price is reducing to top off via, you know, the stablecoin, it brings it back up to, to the, the margin requirement. Like I think there's a lot there where you can do it at like $1000 level or $5000 level, you know, something that would be less not economical in today's world if you have to manually do it. I think some examples like that, you'll start to see banks and that's exactly where the the opposite of the traditional making system isn't. They're used to underwriting and building out their traditional loan origination processes which are tied into the dollar system around AC, HS or wires. Yeah, all great points. Right. Where do you guys want to go from here? We had, there was a couple other headlines. Could we raise funding? Yeah. Where do you want to go? Let's go to the X4 O2 deal with Coinbase and Gemini and Claude. I think that's gotten a lot of traction as of recently and Michael brought up a good point. I think there's I saw somewhere that they did over 100,000 transactions in a day of just agentic to agentic payment of I think it's mostly stable coins at this point, but it's interoperable between whichever payment or token people want to use in order to pay. You know AI based on API usage. It sounds like some folks internal within Coinbase too are actually thinking about so how it's going to work. Is Coinbase well or you can pay based on your tokens usage APIs in real time. But you could. They're also planning to develop a credit card in which you can just pay on credit, but the end user will receive the tokens instantaneously rather than have net 30 settlement and Coinbase will be able to you know, take the spread on on that and actually receive fees for it. So they give you both the option to pay Netsettle in real time as well as offer credit card fees. And this is going to be extremely important as just the usage of AI ramps up over time. Just because in order to find the right information on the Internet, there is going to be a lot more people are going to need to be incentivized in order to, you know, run the run the right models and have everything there for you. Because the internet's going away from a advertising based system is more agents just go and try to find the right information for you. And so you'll naturally use it a little bit less. So I don't necessarily know how all of this is going to play out. I know that, you know, on a much longer time horizon, those who are pretty sophisticated will want to, you know, save and and you know, demand to be paid in Bitcoin. But I think it's really interesting to to see just because we're seeing stable coins pick up a lot more just from, you know other use cases outside of just being the other side and digital asset transactions and for trading day-to-day. Yeah, I have some thoughts, but Brian, curious if you have anything before. No, go for it. So this isn't worth much because the bookends are easy in life in the sense of like we're here today and then Bitcoin is money in the future. It's how you get there. But with that said, I think the bookends end up to what Liam was saying is how do we end up, where do we end up is information systems versus permissionless systems. And I think ultimately we're all these large models end up as centralized, controlled and having whatever ideological bent that's allowed. And we'll say what was used to being said. And you will use regulated stable coins to access it. And then you end up in this other side, which is permission, permission lists. And you'll have these different models that are going to be governed in certain regions and certain local fashions. And then you'll naturally need Bitcoin. I think that historically crypto has always been this like test net for where the market will go because it's there's more sophisticated people building on it, There's just more dollar attention towards it. And so you see more surface of designing, but ultimately it's all built on the old permission world that will will not like persist. And so then you'll end up on the other side. The thing that kind of gets a little Orwellian is if we've talked about this a little bit before around the amount of infrastructure and capital invested into AI, they'll never be recruited, at least in real terms. And you can just see if you squint like how AI will somehow be so pervasive in our day-to-day usage, whether it's, you know, health checking your own personal health score, access online to do different things, where like it, it surpasses search that it starts to become a public utility effectively because you have to pay for the energy, the, the production, the, the inferences and everything to run. And so eventually where the Ubi and the stable coins getting pushed from whatever version is like a public good. And that's what runs. But then you're stuck in that system because ultimately, if that's what you recognize as digital money, as these stable dollars and that's how you get them and that's how you get paid from your employer and that's what you recognize as the US dollar and supporting the, you know, the government, whatever it is, that's one version of, you know, people using. And then you end up in this other version, which is people recognizing that not only what they're getting fed is the right or better version via the algo, but also you have this form of money that's appreciating and probably has better permission, you know, better tooling because of the programmability and the interoperability versus the stable coins that will inherently have certain limitations. I think this is where we end on a long at a timer is I don't know how fast we get there, but it's probably not going to be good. Hey guys, hope you're enjoying the podcast. Wanted to give a quick word from early riders. We've had no shortage of exciting announcements the past few weeks. Last week we announced an investment in audio, a Latin American based on ramp in based in Mexico City and El Salvador. Wonderful founders multiple exits had formerly exited verifiable Bitcoin and and launched Swapito, which we ran into audio last week. And then also Argos Sprott family company incredibly excited about the intersection of gold and Bitcoin. And what does that look like for managing and protecting wealth over the next coming, you know, call it decade and beyond? We've included no shortage of research investment memos around those company fundraising processes, just so folks understand how we think about companies. What we're looking at. If you're looking to build and are trying to get, you know, early riders involved, we'd encourage you to reach out. We'd love to speak with you as well as if you're looking to get involved with early riders, we'd love to talk with you. With no shortage of other opportunities. We're actively looking at a very exciting 2026 is upon us. And as we talked about during this episode, there's no shortage of M&AA lot of these companies, the reality is they can't really build. They're going to have to eventually buy companies to really insert best practices, best teams, best infrastructure. So we're incredibly excited what we're building. We're looking for best in class talent and folks to get involved. And so if that's you, please reach out Michael at early writers.com or you can reach out via the contact form. All right, guys, we'll talk to you later this week on the last trade and I hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. Yeah. And that reminds me of, you know, just the the notion of, you know, ultimately they become Public Utilities at some point more so out of necessity because of the the energy uses and the need for token imprints. Like there was a, a sort of flow chart or infographic that was showing basically for every $1.00 of, you know, an end client paying chat CBT subscription. So for every $1.00 that they're paying in a subscription, there's about $8 of costs that go into producing whatever that, you know, the output of that dollar of spend is. And because along that chain of payments and revenue and cost are, you know, that sort of circular image that we've seen the meme around, you know, all these AI companies doing deals with each other, that $8 is really just, you know, being paid back and forth to all, you know, all these different parts of the chain. And so you could see a world in in which, you know, these things do need to become sort of Public Utilities. And mainly just because there's, there's actually not a profitable endeavor here for, for most of these companies outside of, you know, what we've already seen. So that's that's an interesting sort of element of all of this as well. And what's funny though, is like everyone knows Public Utilities are good or, or, or goods are inherently less sophisticated and better than traditional private enterprises. And so that kind of ties into if it's a public utility, you're going to get the slot that it's given to everyone versus if you can pay additional and a better form of money. Yeah, this is something I've just been thinking about. The the other thing that randomly came up and you'll appreciate because I know how much you love ETH is I forgot it was a random podcast and they were referencing like this internal infighting. And, and, and I'll say you guys remember having to listen to it because I don't know how I stumbled on it, but it was basically describing like this infighting with the ETH community about some of the lead developers going to tempo And what was real fat really fascinating about it is like the lack of fundamentals and foundation of all this crap we're talking about because nobody has any real basis on why they do what they're doing outside of like money. And incentives. So the ETH, it was like rumored that they just like ETH pays all these people really bad, whatever. It's not the ETH foundation, it's some like derivative of it. But it was looked at as like a prestigious thing for if you're an engineer to go work for. And then they, they like this one main guy had only made like 600K over like 6 years and he was like a world class engineer and effectively went to tempo that just raised you know, $500 million. And it's kind of like the hot thing or one of the hot things right now in crypto. And it was this reality of like, it's always just the next thing because unless somebody fully understands the fundamentals and what's going to accrue value, they're just like missing the force of the treason. And then it's like whether it's the philosophy or ideology of ETH, Improbability World Computer, but they don't have any real bases. So then they move with the win because the next thing that comes is the next thing. And then that person's willing to pay them more. And so the next round will be something else that's not Stripe and Tempo when they realize this permission system doesn't make sense. And I thought that was just fascinating because all these guys, if you, if you, if we're on a panel or somebody was listening that didn't really understand what we're talking about, they'd be like these guys are close minded or like they don't understand what's happening or this is the next wave. And it's like, sure, it's going to work for a little bit. But the reality is the best technology will generally went along on a time horizon, especially the best tooling and programmability. And all these products are inherently flawed because of the lack of interoperability. And also they're just the underlying counterparty risk that's associated The market along on a time horizon will realize all of this, but they don't get it. Like they're in a lot of it just comes to money. It's the same thing with the Dats, right? Because like people went to Dats because they were promised, you know, either large equity payouts by former shares and also base capital. And the market inherently doesn't, you know, think critically. It just follows what the the certain trend is. So if all these people are raising Dats or temples and stable coins, well then it must have some innovation versus really just getting back to the fundamentals. So I just thought that was interesting with ETH and then natural this next cycle people are moving on to other block chains. Well, yeah, I think part of the story there as it relates to Ethereum is effectively like, you know, put aside the flaws of these permission systems that we're just talking about, but that is effectively where they see, you know, these developers are seeing the puck going in, effectively abandoning what was historically sort of this decentralization theater around Ethereum. You know, real world assets, stables are going to run on these permissionless, quote UN quote permissionless rails that's sort of been abandoned in favor of whether it's Tempo or Stripe or, or any of these fintech incumbents who are just going to build their own blockchain. Tethers are going to do the same. And so you, I think it's natural to see flight from those prior ecosystems, which thought they were being decentralized and, you know, building things with the crypto forward ethos. To me, this isn't just indicative of effectively the abandonment of those, those theses and those narratives and just saying, no, like we're just going to build centralized databases that like, that's what the actual, that's what the market actually wants. Like that's where the product market feed fit is for these stable coins. It's no one actually cares if they're decentralized or not. They just need to be fast and cheap. And we need to, you know, trust the issuer to some extent. And so I think that's exactly what you're seeing play out. And so yeah, the Ethereum community is butthurt as as always. I mean, on that note, I know Liam brought that link and I don't know if you want to pull it up or if there's anything that just stood out on the A16Z article or the the report that they put out. Yeah. I think that there are just a lot of people who just fundamentally do the industry incorrectly. I think one of the biggest metrics that there was is just like these, these people are trying to value Bitcoin and all the cryptos like they're just companies when they're fundamentally different. There was a like, OK, Solana and Hyper Liquid are capturing the, I think it's, I don't know exactly what slide it is, but Solana and Hyper Liquid are capturing the majority of real economic value today. A big economic, a big shift from Bitcoin and Ethereum's dominance in the past and how they're measuring this is the amount of fees that each blockchain receives or is willing to pay. And they think that just because that's like pretty much like how you capture value in businesses. It's like how, how much are customers willing to pay? And so they're just fundamentally looking at all of these block chains, which with the idea of like, you know, what's the network and customer willingness to pay rather than the actual like how much value is it bringing to customers, not how much our customers paying, right? And so that's a massive fundamental difference, which with, you know, I think bitcoins brought all of us a lot of value by being able to store more of our money over time. And you know, low fees have been been nice because we've been able to move our money around on a very on a relatively cheap basis. And so I think that there's a fundamental difference and that's kind of how all private equity thinks as well, which is just like, OK, if the business isn't capturing value, it's not worth a lot. And that's fundamentally different with how much deli value they're actually delivering to their end, end user or end customer. And so I think it's just a off way of thinking about the industry. And then there were a few other charts in there that were interesting mostly around just like stable coin usage, decoupling from actual transaction volumes out there. Yeah. I mean one thing I'll say about some of this transaction, you know on chain economic, economic activity is this is not good data. And I say that from experience, from my time at Coinbase, like assessing some of these other block chains, like there was always this issue or concern of just looking at the high level transaction data or volume is just not indicative of actual economic activity. Because for a lot of these things, you know, the easiest example is probably just meme coin trading, trading which is predominantly occurs on Solana. You know, the vast majority of that trade volume is just not real, like it's not actual economic activity. And so there was always this process, you know, even, you know, at Coinbase on this sort of investment research side that would say, well, we have to discount this activity to some extent because we know that a lot of it is just, you know, patently not real. And so I would take a lot of this stuff with a grain of salt because what is being sort of heralded as on chain economic activity is not always such. Yeah. The thing I think about with all of this is is ultimately like there's so much liquidity and so many dollars in the system that you end up with all of this Frankenstein style, like just these metrics in these numbers in these decks and everyone working on this, the majority of people believe it's real innovation and there's a lot of incentives to do in it. It's kind of similar to AI where AI, you know, really popped up. I think GBT launching in what 20-2, maybe 21 and then kind of like the fervor really picked up and how many like hundreds of billions of dollars have been deployed there. And similar with like crypto, every couple years you have new cycles, the Async A16Z's of the world and other large firms. They have real political capital, real lobbying dollars to not only further an industry, which we're seeing with this market structure Bill, but then ultimately bring in large scale capital allocators via their subsequent, their previous funds, but also their names and brands and and under the guise of innovation. And so you end up directionally with innovation, which is happening with the ability to like move capital and store well, but then everything else ends up with all this noise until you see like how much money has been deployed into crypto. And, you know, right now we're in this like uptrend. So there's these metrics that you can mask and like hide that look like positive growth, but the second the market ends up in those bear markets where ultimately people aren't speculating, then everything and all the volume ends up going back to effectively nothing. And. We saw, right? We saw, we saw exactly that two weeks ago in the, in the, you know, flash crash when market makers step back and there's actually no volume for these things and they can crash, you know, 90% in 10 minutes. Yeah, no volume, no traction. And I think the key point there is, it's not to say there's not money in value to be made, value to capture, value to accrue, but it's around the fundamentals as Liam was sharing around, like as you bring in all this capital and awareness, will people naturally end up going through, Sometimes they have to touch the stove and they're like, OK, well, this thing has fundamentals. There's only 21 million XYZ, maybe I want to park more of my capital there. Well, then now I need to figure out how do I figure out the underlying custody? How do I lend against it? How do I have it best in class financial service partner. Generally those going to be in certain regions. Stablecoins are of value in the sense that people we still live in a dollar denominated world and the ability to move those from a capital movement perspective. So there's things that will accrue value, but it's really coming after that lens and then you still have to add to that. Well, what are the right building blocks around? How do I return more capital if I'm looking at it in a Bitcoin layered world? Because if I raise, you know, 10 million bucks and I really don't have visibility into how to return anywhere near that. Well, it's a rational thing to do is build slow, hold that money in Bitcoin and then build value added services. And this is how we think about we're looking at companies investing in the exposure we get. And so the it's very similar to like what when I think about multi institution not really having any competitors because you're ultimately competing with firms that are doing things in A to the, to the market that understands multi institution, the value they provides as inferior offerings. In the same way that like when we have investments in our investors, they look at us and we're looking at a fundamental different landscape on the type of entrepreneur that's trying to create and deliver and return more Bitcoin to the type of companies that are seen through the noise of crypto and understanding. OK, well, there are market opportunities and then Bitcoin really has is going to be the net settlement layer around innovation station around stable coins. So there's a lot of opportunity with all the noise, but you have to be able to understand and see through it. And generally that comes with time. That's the sad part is it's very hard for somebody out of Silicon Valley or Wall Street. And you know, you guys know better than Liam being closest to that old world before joining of like how many people we're on a call last week with one worked at a large hedge fund and you know, is used to trading and all the things associated. But like, when it really comes down to what what what's the right way to do this and what's the right way to think from first principles. If we're going to insert risk into our own trying to return capital will win. The market gets really hot. Is that really the time to really take a step back and think about what's happening? Because usually that is preceded by a kind of a downtrend and a deleveraging. All these things people just have to go through. And there's a real proof of work of just like being in the market, seeing these things that I think most people are lacking. And that's really the opportunity for us. Exactly. Well said. And it's about durable things that deliver value to their cost to customers that they'll pay for over a long period of time. Just like, you know, some of these things that are going on the AI space are are not necessarily that as well as saw went through a little bit of Galaxy's financials just because they reported Q3 and about half of their assets are assets under stake. And they're seeing a massive jump in customers of Dats who are now staking with them. And it's just like, it's not very like we've seen this with cycles in the past. Like the DAT phase is, you know, I'm not going to say it's over, but maybe for some of these other coins, it's not necessarily going to be as durable as something like, you know, offering, even though we know qualified custodianship is, is not necessarily perfect, like offering custody trading, lending to, you know, financial partners on Bitcoin who will be there for a long time and who actually understand where this is all going. So it's just like a massive divergent and you know, the opportunity for the space and, and where some of the other folks are focused on. Yeah. It's, it all comes back to distorted price signals to me in, in some sense whether it's, you know, looking at, you know, phony transaction volume data, which then you know people build investment theses around, you know that poor quality or low quality data, which then leads to you know funding and all this M&A and all these acquisitions. And so there is sort of this self referential loop component to all of this where people are leveraging, you know, data that is sort of mischaracterizing the actual economic value being created with a lot of these protocols. But you know, for the by and large, a lot of these entities that are doing deals and investing in these things don't care because they know that there's money coming in. And, and you know, the, the, the end result of that, however, is that there is going to be a lot of capital destruction and malinvestment that occurs as a result of this. So just something to keep in mind. All right, gents, we're a little over an hour here. Anything else you guys wanted to raise before we step away? No, I think, I think we've covered a lot. I think it's going to be pretty exciting TBD on exciting end of year because his volatility is a little little little off with what's going on with the China Trump and everything else and market structure. But I think 2026, it feels, you know, maybe famous last words, but 2026 is going to be pretty wild and active from this area of the industry. It seems like things are just getting turned on from the the the plumbing from institutions all the way to retail investors and we just need a little bit of uptick reflexivity with like, you know, the market sentiment coming back and it's going to be an interesting next probably 12 to 24 months. Yeah. And I know you don't like to talk macro on the show, Michael, but big week in general for various events, interest rate decision Wednesday, Powell comments, lots of big public company earnings and then Trump to meet with XI on Thursday. That comes in the wake of the sort of tariff on off volatility that we've seen over the past couple weeks. That just means a great Friday night pump, after all. That could be, could, could mean exactly that. All right, gentlemen, thanks as always. See you next. Wonderful. See ya. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. 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