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What you're telling me is that music is about to stop, and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of. Gutless. 1974198792972. 1000 and whatever we're. Going to call this. It's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we sell. Hey, OK, I say when we sell. Welcome back everybody. It's a little bit of a early week podcast before the big Nashville conference. We're joined by DDA Lavelle, CEO of Tetra Trust, which we're excited to talk about some really interesting things we're doing with them, but also his background and what Tetra Trust is doing in Canada, which is pretty exciting. DD and I could connected back in consensus and you know, for building this industry for a while, I had no idea kind of Canadians status from Canada, status from custody, the regulatory environment and how much it's sought after across the globe, frankly, for assets and security. So, DDA, welcome to the podcast. Thanks guys. I appreciate you having me. Awesome. Well, I figured in part of the notes we maybe just start with your background. I think what I've historically seen in this space, it's really fascinating, is some of the best builders, if not the best builders come from a traditional professional background, whether it's like big tech, I think of Mike Belshie and Google or your background at UBS and the Royal Bank of Canada. And just curious kind of like how your journey there and how you got there and then went to Bitcoin and ultimately founding and building Tetra. Super fascinating. I think it will, you know, really shed a lot of light on what. We're doing here. Yeah, absolutely. You know, when you look at at the background, you know, I would probably qualify myself as a, you know, call it a stock market junkie to start, if I may use that terminology. Always very curious, always very interested in companies. My father was an entrepreneur and and really the stock market gave me the opportunity to, you know, evaluate just companies after companies. So I started in equity research, did that for a little bit of time, and then eventually went to work at UBS across essentially Canada and then eventually to RBC for where I spent about a decade. I was focused on equities for about 12 years. So really equity research, equity trading, equity sales. On the institutional side. You know, one of the piece that was always interesting for me, specifically on the institutional sales side, was to spend time with leaders of businesses. So, you know, CE OS and CF OS to roadshows, worried about their business, learned what investors thought was was relevant and important. You know, I had a little bit of an event at 35I, you know, I had my daughter, she was born in Manhattan. And I looked at, you know, all the skill set that I had accumulating being on an equity desk, and I basically said it's time for a pivot. And RBC gave me this great opportunity to essentially, you know, pivot into another piece of their business. And I moved into, you know, essentially asset servicing and treasury management, move from equities to foreign exchange, essentially managed foreign exchange trading desks, learn, you know, kind of the trading business, the first line of defense, the capital and risk management, the PNL management excetera really quickly then, you know, my career really started accelerated from there. I was given an opportunity to essentially build an automated foreign exchange execution system and and to help with that roll out, build a team which which was fantastic experience. And then my last role before Tetra was essentially a head of Canadian custody product where RBC had about four trillion in assets. You know, when you think about the transition between Trad 5 to digital assets, I mean, for me it came with a little bit of frustration and, you know, being supposedly a change agent within a large organization, but having very little capacity to actually change anything. More specifically, you know, if you look at, you know, technology that's 50 or 60 years old, that is basically what the banking systems are built on today. You know, the lack of capacity to integrate with, you know, just basic things like API. People take for granted that the banking system works really well, but when you look under the hood, it's a bunch of manual steps and really, really old systems. So having the opportunity to build essentially on blockchain technology, you know, modernize financial infrastructure and, and really leave, you know, legacy infrastructure, I think for the future. And you know, my, my, my kids are a big part of my narrative. Was really excited for me and you know, almost a no brainer in terms of opportunity. At Onramp, we believe that Bitcoin is the most important asset of the 21st century. The hard part is securing it, right. There are shortcomings with keeping your coins on an exchange, but also with setting up your own self custody arrangement. On Ramp solves for these concerns. Our multi institution custody solution maximizes security and minimizes counterparty risk, ensuring that your Bitcoin remains securely in your possession and provides built in inheritance planning to ensure your family is protected as well. On Ramp provides Peace of Mind for your Bitcoin journey, whether for your whole stack or for part of it as a compliment to your existing self custody set up. For more information, check us out at on rampbitcoin.com. Yeah, that that's fascinating. I guess where in that story did like Bitcoin and blockchain kind of like fall in? Was it you know, post COVID in the 2020 or where? Where does that like insert the bug? Yeah, I know, absolutely. I mean, I actually, it was out of curiosity that I came across Bitcoin. I, I, I read Digital Gold, which is now appropriate in 2024, but essentially the book that Nathaniel Popper published in, in 2016. So I read it, you know, around the 2016 time frame and you know, being a public market investor, just making a lot of sense to me to even put a fractional amount of, yeah, let's say our, our allocation into investments into Bitcoin. And at the time, living in New York, I mean, I had access to a basically Coinbase wallet. I think if I remember correctly, I bought some Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum and, and just basically sat on it. I remember the reaction from some of my counterparties on a trading floor is essentially, you know, you're, you're kind of nuts. Why would you do this? It's a scam, this and that. But I just really, it kind of really resonated with me. The technology, you know, the aspect of the store of value remittances and, and you know, payments, you know, potential use cases. I'll be honest, it kind of sad dormant there for for a long time. It wasn't until, you know, I was asked to take a look at Tetra and what I could do that I really kind of refreshed, you know, my outlook on digital assets and you know, essentially all the possibilities that came. But it also came at a point where my frustration around financial technology was also very high. So I think it was a perfect match. You know, the timing, the, the inception of me being interested in digital asset happened much earlier in my career are before Tetra. I would say, you know, 4-5 years before. But the match came at a point where personally, I was ready for change but also, you know, felt incapable of delivering change, you know, in my, in my current capacity at a big financial institution. Yeah, that's, that's so interesting to hear. I had a similar sort of experience of, of I was working at Bain as a management consultant and in 2014 I I got pulled into put helping put together our perspective on on digital transformation for banks, you know, like our our firm wide perspective on it. And you know, obviously it's led by the partner. And then as a lower level analyst, I was, I was putting stuff together, but the thing that that quickly became off limits was you weren't allowed to recommend updating from mainframe computers. So that was you, you know, we, we were developing our digital transformation playbook for banks, but you weren't allowed to suggest that you should maybe consider updating from mainframe computers because it was, it was mission critical infrastructure that you couldn't, you couldn't mess with. And that was a, one of the points that one of the ingredients, I think that helped me be interested in cryptocurrency. When I also read Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper. And it's a little too bad he doesn't focus more on Bitcoin in that book, 'cause I also went down that altcoin path at that time. But it's, it's interesting hearing similar sort of you were aware of these data points as they became, you know, part of your professional life about how the old, the legacy system is, is not up to the challenge of a digital future. And you know, digital native infrastructure is, is really the way to go and, and you're, you're building that now. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, one of the things I would I would maybe point out there as well as, you know, you take for granted, right in the US, you know, you have AJP Morgan account or Bank of America, you use Venmo to transfer value to, to your friends. I mean, in Canada, the infrastructure is slightly different, but at the end of the day, it's a handful of massive actors that are providing getting, you know, banking services and then, you know, allow you to interact on, on this, interact on various platforms. Actually the, you know the, let's say the exchange of value in Canada is done on the system like on called Interact that is owned by the big 5 banks. The you know, the points of the data. I don't think I would have gotten there if I didn't work in asset servicing and treasury management. When you start, you know, looking at transferring value all over the planet and the steps involved in moving cash, you know, the different custodian, custodian access to central banks. I mean, you start drawing a map of complexity that just, you know, I think would blow anybody's mind. But to be fair, most people don't really fully understand it unless you're trying to sell or send money, sorry, internationally to loved ones or to family members or for whatever reason you might have not, you know, seen those issues. But those issues are real. And, you know, you see it with fractional reserves in the USI mean, I don't have to talk to you guys about this. You know, we saw it really well in in 2023 with some of the bank failures. And it's happened historically a few times as well. So, you know, those data points just got, I would say more intense, Jesse, as my knowledge of the financial infrastructure also got deeper and deeper. And we try to, as part of the narrative at Tetra, educate people on basic concept of financial systems, right? Not necessarily going too deep, but how money moves, you know, why it's inefficient, why blockchain technology can help, you know, the role that Bitcoin can play into that. So there's an education part of of what we do as well that can help people understand better how risky it is currently to, you know, maintain the current financial infrastructure that as it stands. Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense in understanding that landscape because I think that really is like prerequisite almost to changing it, right? It's like if we know the existing model and how it's inefficient and then we have this new technology, then how can you map it to like basically fill the gap in those inefficiencies? But taking a step back, yeah, I'm curious, So you had the time at RBC and was working through building there and then looked at Tetra, founded in 2019. What was that relationship with Tetra in Canada from 19 to 2022? And was there a component of just like how you referenced this idea that you had Bitcoin sitting at Coinbase dormant? I think most people globally are now are starting to realize like, wait, maybe it doesn't make sense for me to send all my Bitcoin to San Francisco. I need other solutions. And curious if that was part of Tetra's founding story or where the foundation of Tetra started and ultimately how you were pulled in in 2022 to leave the firm? Yeah. So you know, really the Tetra inception came out of the Quadriga failure in Canada. So Quadriga CX, you know when Quadriga happened, you really had two marketplaces in Canada to purchase and sell digital assets. It was Quadriga and it was Coin Square and you know it. It highlighted the need to have proper qualified custody or third party custodian, essentially behind the crypto trading platforms and what retail users would be using. It also started a journey around educating local regulators around, you know, what a digital asset custodian framework would look like at a trust level. NYDFS was ahead of Canada definitely. I mean, because I think they issued their first license in 2015 to to Paxos and then Gemini got one that few months later, but it took until July 2021 for the Canadian regulators to essentially issue a license to, to Tetra. So from 19 to 21, essentially there was a lot of work that was done behind the scenes trying to educate the regulators as to why this was necessary. And it also came at a time where there was a lot of work being done by our regulators in Canada around, well, how do we prevent Puerto Rico from happening again? What kind of checks and balances do we need? And you know, it's, it's obviously custody has an important part of it because the guy was basically holding the keys and disappeared with all the clients assets, right. So that's really the inception story of Tetra. It came out of a failure and essentially the necessity of having proper qualified custody in country, locally regulated. And as you, you know, you're probably aware, you know, the financial system or infrastructure in Canada, you know, is, is I would argue well governed, right? Like we went through the great financial crisis relatively unscathed. You know, we have a very conservative framework up here. You know, there's only a handful of that entities. They have, you know, pretty, pretty strong capital controls. So having the opportunity to create a similar framework for digital assets I think has resonated really, really well across the globe just because of the, you know, perceived safety that the Canadian financial infrastructure brings and the control around governance etcetera for its its financial institutions. And Didier, Marty here jumped in late, had a call that ran quite a bit longer than expected. So sorry for being a bit tardy. But with that in mind, like what are when you're looking to right the wrongs of Quadriga and start from Ground Zero building up in terms of providing the market with quality custody solutions? What are like the number one, two and three things in the checklist that you need to be wary of providing this type of service to the market? Is it more social governance before you even get the technical? Does it start from a technical base? What are the assurances that you guys look to provide the market to right the wrongs that were created by Quadriga? Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, nice hat. Love Prince St. Pizza. Yeah, you know, I would say you definitely have to start with, for us it starts with key management and key control, right. Who has access to the keys? How are they governed and control, you know, backups, segregation of roles and responsibilities and and really educating as well, Marty across across the board, right. Again, going back to let's say day one, you start a conversation with a regulator, they have no concept of what digital assets are. And anyways, most of them and they don't know how it's going to fit in, right. They have a vision of, you know, let's say equities depositories like DTCC or you know, CBS up in Canada and entities that control, you know, virtual certificates for equities. But they don't have a concept, you know, digital asset, you know, key management, wallet infrastructure, etcetera. So it, it really starts with, OK, what's the proper governance framework to ensure that we know where the keys are at all times. We know that there's no single individual that can leave with those keys. We understand there's proper governance and oversight. So Tetra, when it started on day one, Tetra had a board of directors, all very experienced and you know financial institutions, financial infrastructure, a lot of our board members have gone on and build great businesses over their career to the right of governance and oversight from various committees, right? We have audit committees, we have governance committees, etcetera. So providing that right, that right infrastructure, it also goes with transparency in my view, right? You know, to your point, Michael, around sending all your Bitcoin to San Francisco. I mean, we do a lot of work with a lot of platform globally's and globally. And at times when you start asking questions around key and key management, you know, you will get answers like, well, you know, we don't share our secret or here's our shock. Don't worry, our auditors have reviewed our process. That's not very comforting, specifically from an industry that, you know, typically would say don't just trust verify, right? So the transparency, the governance, I think are fundamental points. And then Marty, I think what probably makes Canada a little bit different than other markets as well as some of the capital metrics and capital requirements around running a trust structure. So we have very clearly defined capital metrics at Tetra that we need to meet. There's a lot of capital behind the entity to essentially, you know, we're going to call it protect and airport the assets. But there's a certain level of maturity inside that you need to have to offer in this space, which again, I think is, is is pretty good and you know, helps prevent, you know, the kind of failures that you might have seen in other jurisdictions just because of how the entities are, are positioned towards the regulators. It's fascinating because I think most people forget about Quadriga in 2018 and like knowing Tetra stem from that or the the reason for its existence. It would imagine you guys were OK in 2022, but there was a lot of firms that in 2022 went belly up because they didn't have that framework to build from the ground up. They were the first version. They were the Quadriga of that vintage. So it's just fascinating to see that like circle kind of go around in different markets. And I know when we chatted that there was regulatory bodies all over the world, frankly reaching out to you guys, trying to understand either your custody model or some of the oversight that Canada had to, you know, thinking about like whether it's UAE or some of the Caymans to have a better framework and how they should think about digital assets. It's curious like how that that's gone. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's fascinating, but what also humbling, right, to get to get outreach from various jurisdictions, you know, around the custodial framework, the governance, you know what I would call our terms and conditions with our primary regulators, but also how we work with, you know, the rest of the industry in, in governing the system, the framework. I think there's been obviously a lot of jurisdictions over the last, you know, two years, 2 1/2 years that are really dug into digital assets that want to create frameworks that aren't sure where to start, You know, having a failure, I think I'll always helps, you know, push you forward pretty quickly. I mean, you know, just look at what's happening in India in the last week or so. And I'm sure there's going to be some regulatory impact that's going to come out of that. You know, they, they want to hear, you know, essentially from the regulatory landscape. They want to hear from the market participants. They want to understand essentially what's the barrier to entry or how high the barrier is. I mean, you know, a Tetra, we like to think about our specific license. It's just, you know, not only setting the standard in the marketplace, but also, you know, almost like a little bit of a starting place, right? We're now three years in operation. There's no other entities in Canada been able to essentially land the license that we have, even though there's been, you know, what we're told over 12 applicants. You know, we are consistently evolving the standard. And I think one of the things that I can point to is, for example, proof of reserves. When we started, you know, in 2021, one of the requirements that we had worked with the regulator on was essentially to do proof of reserves twice a year. So before 2022, before FTX 4, you know, people started releasing their wallet addresses and basically validating everything that was, you know, in the vaults or on the platforms on chain. Tetra was already doing those audits. Now, as you guys are probably very familiar with a proof of reserve isn't perfect and you know, the very nature that it's a snapshot of the specific point in time, right? So there's all sorts of things that can happen around that snapshot. And I think you've seen some global exchanges essentially, you know, move assets in for the proof of reserves and then out and then the activity is validated on changing. People can see that that happened. But one of the things we work on is essentially, well, how do you make that framework better, right? What's better than proof of reserves, let's say biannually is be able to do it more frequently, being able to do it ad hoc, being able to basically you know, have the regulators go on chain themselves and verify the information that we are providing essentially given also them the tools to go and verify themselves. Again, going back to that phrase, don't trust verify. And so you know, we've been able to develop a lot of framework in Canada based on the initial requirements and then push those those frameworks forward. And I think it's helped a lot of jurisdictions essentially evolve their landscape. We're actually in in talks with a couple of jurisdictions where they would like Tetra to come in and and basically operate as an entity, you know, apply educate on the framework, potentially do a key deployment locally, which which is all very interesting. I think you're also going to see a lot more custody in country in the very near future. It is a trend that we are starting to see. I mean, I think Germany's there, UAE's there, Australia's talking about it, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, all jurisdictions. They're essentially talking about, you know, making sure that key ownership and, and key control is in country with a locally registered entity. And I think this is a trend that you're going to see happen more and more. And it makes sense, right? If you have a failure in another jurisdiction, well, it it, you don't want to try to go recover your assets in that jurisdiction if you're a player in another country. I mean, there's all sorts of reasons why jurisdictional risk is suboptimal from a, from a key management perspective, from an asset recovery perspective. So that's certainly one of the trends that we've seen and a lot of players have reached out or a lot of jurisdictions have reached out to basically get our sense on that front. That makes a ton of sense. I mean, we talk about eliminating trusted third parties at the individual level with decentralized exchanges, but if you're a nation state that's going to wade into the waters of Bitcoin, it makes a lot of sense that you would want the keys that secure your Bitcoin held within your borders. I mean, it's been beaten to a dead horse over the last two years, but you just look at what happened to Russia's treasury assets. Whether you agree with Russia's war in Ukraine or not is external to the effect of being able to freeze assets and sell them off without any repercussion on behalf of the person that owns those assets. So it makes sense. And there is one thing I wanted to circle back on as it pertains to proof of reserves, because there is this ongoing conversation about proof of reserves. Can you even do it correctly? Doesn't even make sense. And I do think there's like a spectrum of a proof of reserve system from pretty poor and doesn't give you a lot of assurances to gives you way more assurances and something I've really never heard anybody talk about. But I'd be interested Didier to see if you guys think about this. But within a proof of reserve system. Do you guys basic calculate coin days of the coins that have been hold held in cold storage in particular wallets and and market that as proof of reserve saying like we've had 1000 Bitcoin that have been in this wallet for X amount of days? Because I think that's one of the big knocks on proof of reserves is that somebody who is marketing proof of reserves could easily move some Bitcoin into a wallet like a day, a week, a month before they do the proof of reserve audit and then quickly move it out after. But I think there's some metrics that could be added to proof of reserve. So it would really solidify the legitimacy of a company trying to do proof of reserves. And one of those metrics is coin days within the wallets that you're doing reserves for. Yeah, that's, that's a really good point. I mean, coin days is certainly one of the data points that we are looking to do. The one thing I would say, Marty, is because we have a fair amount of crypto trading platforms on our balance or on our balances, there's a certain transactional aspect to, you know, what we hold. And what I mean by that is there's a lot of in and out, you know, I would say on a daily basis. Additionally, if you look at the ETF business, there's also some transactional nature obviously around subscriptions and redemptions. That means that there's, there's in and out. So you can do a percentage basis, right. You can say, well, let's say 70%, eighty percent, 90%, whatever the number is been there for a certain amount of time. The one thing though that we're really focused on is essentially providing the tools to the various regulators, you know, so they can do their own oversight. So we've been working, you know, our, our partner on this front is Elliptic. We've been working with, you know, various on chain analytics tool. We have our own actually UI that people can sign on to and can they verify the information, the wallets, you know, the addresses themselves. But ultimately what we'd like to do is to make sure that the regulators can go in at any point in time and verify the information because that's really the only way you can get comfort around proof of reserves. In my opinion is don't come through me have the tools to essentially or through Tetra have the tools to essentially go verify yourself whenever you feel that, you know, you need to audit the system. So we are looking to evolve from a, you know, I would say a certain periodic report that we're providing to the to the various regulatory bodies with data sets. Like let's say, you know, the amount of days that, you know, the coins have been in the storage to essentially creating tools to allow people to validate the information themselves. And you might say, well, Diddy, if they sign into your front end, then you can control your front end. OK, fair. But at the end of the day, we're also educating them as to, you know, how to work with the various on chain tools to be able to verify themselves, right? I mean, anybody that understands, you know, this technology, even at a minimum level understands that the, you know, one of the value add is that you can track anything on chain. So, you know, don't use Tetris UI. You can go, you know, to block explore and verify yourself. So we, we are, we are adding data points, but also we are, we are working on creating tools that will allow people to sell verify. Yeah. And I think products falling into that mapping to bitcoins protocol I think are natural, right. Whether it's like multi institution custody from an individual perspective or even at the fund level where we've talked to some fiduciaries that from a fund level the legal or the fiduciary from a moving assets. But like pensions in particular will ask for a wallet that's segregated for their assets. And while that doesn't protect them from a legal perspective, it does provide this quasi proof of reserves that their assets are sitting there, which is, which almost operates like a quasi alarm bell. Because you can imagine if you have that set up, whether it's from a private client or an institutional, from a, from a fund perspective, if assets are moving, that shouldn't be moving now you're like, wait, what's going on? And if that happens enough or just once, that can already send a signal versus what we had to wait for, you know, multiple years in the FTX situation. But going back DDA to the the reference point on keys and and this notion of sovereigns and in countries wanting to hold keys, it's kind of interesting because it maps to a lot of education that we we all talk about here. I think everybody here would say it's not necessarily the hardest to figure out custody. It's hard to figure out custody either at size or scale or from an institutional perspective. And it would make sense as the market gets educated, they want to bring those keys in the same way that when Amazon first started, you know, Amazon W housed majority, if not all of the data. And then as data privacy and all the things associated that got more prevalent and understood you wanted to house that data in different countries, different continents. I'm curious, as you've seen the market get educated post 2022, what are some of the learnings that have either been prerequisites or requirements from the industry? Have you, how have you seen them get more educated and what they're requiring? An example, I guess I think if it's like the UAE and my understanding of like ADGM requiring anybody that's holding cryptographic material via licensed custodian, that's kind of I think probably a little too far just given that what we know about, you know, multi sig in the notion that single entity doesn't have unilateral control. But just curious how you think about what you've seen in the market and how they're the markets getting more educated, the requirements that they're asking? Yeah, I, you know what, I probably have a lot to say. I'm going to try to be concise. There's what I would qualify as bot tick ticking exercises, right? So and then things that actually help you protect your clients or, you know, your assets. Now what I mean by bot tick ticking exercises is, you know, third party custody is now a requirement I would say in the majority of the markets globally that take digital assets pretty seriously. You know, to us, some of the only markets that are really not, don't have a framework right play right now would include places like Australia, but they're certainly working on one. So you have to work with a third party qualified custodian. And now every country has a definition of what a qualified custodian looks like. You know, let's take the US and Canada as an example, right? So both through the NYDFS or through, you know, various states in the US, you have the concept of, you know, being able to get trust licenses or, you know, some organizations like Anchorage have secured banking licenses. In Canada. Right now there's only US and it's through a provincial trust. So the equivalent of, you know, essentially NYDFS would be the Loan and Trust Corporation Act. Now you essentially have the box to tick when you want to become a qualified custodian. So you know, you need a certain amount of capital, you need to certain kinds of audits. So financial audits, you know, you need your sock. Canada is a little bit more. I would advance in the NYNYDFS framework where there's, you know, concept like proof of reserves, penetration testing, you know, so there's added layers of, you know, kind of audits and securities that are that are put forward. So that's one way to look at it. So all parties involved in the regulated framework to provide all qualified custody essentially go through this exercise and say, do I have financial audits, audited financials? Do I have a do I have a sock type 2? No, OK, I got to go get a sock two type 2. Do I have a board or directors? No, I got to go get a board, right. And they go through that exercise and then they take the blocks. Now that provides some control and some governance. And obviously Tetra is a qualified, Odeon is one of those entities. And we have to do all those things every year. Now, there's also steps that, you know, the platforms can take themselves when engaging with the consumer. And one of the things we've seen is, you know is custody, what I would call custody diversification. So essentially not just having all your assets in one custodian, but essentially spreading your assets around or creating redundancy in your infrastructure. I would say that's quickly becoming best practice in Canada and we're seeing it in the US as well. There is no regulatory bodies to my knowledge right now and globally that I've made that a point for any trading platforms. But I do believe that over time you might see requirements where you can't have 100% of your assets in one specific place. You need to have let's say two or three custodians behind. So you can kind of refer to maybe like a two or three versus your key control. That being said, the assets that you have on those platforms, you are taking, you know, essentially single counterparty risk on those assets, right? So if you, let's say have 50% of custodian A and 50% of custodian BI mean 100% of that 50% of your assets is exposed to that, you know, single entity or single player. So you know, the, and this is where I think it's kind of a good leeway into the conversation with with on ramp and between on ramp and, and Tetra is essentially, you know, the capacity to spread your counterparty risk across multiple regulated entities, but that no single entity is essentially, you know, offering you're not getting counterparty risk to no single entity. I think that's a very valuable proposition. I think this is something that you are likely to see more and more of, you know, you're, you're really thinking about segregating your risk across various counterparties and that no single entity is responsible for, you know, specific failures or specific risk. I think it's a novel concept. I think it makes a lot of sense. And I think it's something that we're already seeing, you know, in terms of a trend that's that's starting to to evolve in the custodial landscape. From you're, you're the closest to it. I think of minors as being the most sophisticated with this concept and the best that they do. And it's it's the cousin of what Saylor does is literally just spread it across exchanges into your point hope that 1/5 or 1/3 of their assets go away of a single custodian, which just reminds me of FDIC. It's like, wait, you know how people spread it around? It's like that doesn't sound like a solution for protecting your wealth. It was more of a like question mark or like not question, but just thought of like the the notion of spreading risk at the mining level I think is the closest to sophisticated. But that's still the best that they by nature of understanding Bitcoin have to build these facilities. But then the best that they have is literally to just spread it across multiple entities. Well, that and it's also from a legal perspective too. That's what I think multi institution, multi SIG. And I know sitting on the board of a Canadian mining company myself, like we had to pick specific custody providers based on whether or not they're SoC 2 compliant and their governance structures that they have in place. And so that alone limits the number of people that are in custody with at least as a publicly traded company in Canada. And so I think the more multi CIG, multi institution solutions that come to market with qualified custodians that are sock 2 compliant and have proper audits and governance structures in place, like it's going to make way more sense for these minors to consolidate their holdings into these multi institution multi Cigs. And then if you want to diversify from there, maybe you go to a single provider and just maybe you have two or three different quorums of institutions. Controlling keys around different addresses that you control that maybe that's the the trend of what is considered diversification of treasury assets, treasury Bitcoin in the future. Yeah. It goes back to what Didier was was saying about, you know, if, if you, if you're splitting your assets between two custodians, you're currently, you currently have 100% risk with 50% of your stack in two different situations, but 100% risk with that portion because you're trusting a single custodian. And Marty, I think to your point, like multi institution custody is new and it's still emerging, right? We've only been working on it for a few years, but it's, it's been possible with Bitcoin for 10 years. And as we progress with building out that the kind of regulatory check boxes that are that, that folks, you know, who, who have a board of a board of managers have to check those boxes, then you know, we multi institution custody is, is on a fast track to become a, a, a superior option to that current model of split your eggs into multiple baskets. But you're risking it all with a single custodian. You know, you're, you're 50% is risked 100% with a single custodian. And you know, the moving from that model to a fault tolerant model where Marty, to your point, maybe you have multiple quorums where you, you're risking 50% of your stack with, in a 2O3 multi institution multi sig setup where there's fault tolerance inherently built into that. So, so you're not, you know, if one of those custodians goes down, you, you still have the ability to hold to, to recover 100% of those assets. That that's, that's just a step function better in terms of, of assurances to the end client that their Bitcoin will be safe for the long haul because of fault tolerance. That's it's not possible when you're splitting up your stack into trusting all of it, 100% of that portion with a single person, single custodian. Yeah. And I mean, Jesse, you've referenced clients, but I could certainly see a case where particularly in public markets like in the best interest of shareholders, it is demanded that you put your Bitcoin in a setup like this. So that's what it all. It's just. A function of time until this, this model proves itself out and checks enough of those regulatory boxes such that there becomes, I think you're right, demand from shareholders that that'll be a sea change moment where this model becomes so objectively better in terms of assurances to shareholders that it becomes demanded from the bottom up as well as as you know, sought out from the top down from, you know, decision makers in the organization. Yeah, this is a product of exactly that. For outside of, you know, a partner group, it becomes really hard to self custody the asset because you're you're managing capital on behalf of others and the alternative was leaving it on a single custodian. And we all know, you know that Bitcoin has additional assurances and security profile. You don't necessarily have to do it. I think what Jesse said is really important that what's happening here, it could have been done for 10 years. It's just more of an education coupled with the need want the price. As the price appreciates, then naturally counterparty risk becomes greater because amount of Bitcoin, whether an individual's leaving on an entity or the entity's housing, you want to like remove yourself potentially from losing that asset or moving that asset. And the, the real if call it anything innovative is more of the legal framework wrapped around the, the whole holding the agency of that key and then the requirement to move the asset. And so Didier, this kind of ties back to our conversation. It was fascinating because this relationship here was a confluence of multiple things. We were having this discussion and you, you being so close to the industry, it's seen this tailwind of requirement of multiple custodians being, you know, participating in the custody of you know, an entity's assets from diversification or risk, along with what we were building with multi institution with ourselves on ramp coin cover and Bitco. And we've all been seeing this natural sophistication or sophisticated requirement or ask from investors of having multi jurisdictional key. So not only key segregated from different institutions, but also key sitting at different sovereign levels. And so part of this first initial relationship we're announcing that will come out either I believe Tuesday of this week before the conference, which would the 23rd when this podcast will be released is the first multi institution, multi jurisdictional quorum between Bitco, Tetra and coin cover in the UK. That will come with all the assurances that we brought on with insurance and transaction protection. Bitco's qualified custody key signing, which is little known, but that key that protects the honor multi institution vault is the same key that participates in the two ETFs that are housed that's offline cold storage. And then Tetra will also be participating in this, which we're insanely excited to bring to market because we think as Jesse said, it's a step function improvement on a lot of the custodial situations that have existed and going narrow just for treasuries. We see that growing adoption. You can imagine as fiduciaries or capital managers are coming in, it's a step function improvement on leaving all the Bitcoin on a single custodian. Does your Bitcoin custody setup keep you up at night? Maybe you still have coins sitting on an exchange. Worried about hackers? 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Multi institution custody eliminates single points of failure, reduces your personal attack surface and technical burden, and provides access to financial services that allow you to confidently secure your Bitcoin, including inheritance planning, insurance backed warranties for all balances and transactions, low cost trading, and more. Bitcoin is a once in a species asset, secure it right. Learn more at onrampbitcoin.com. Well, I was going to say, you know, it is very exciting and and you can see, I mean, you guys are obviously partners with Big Bow. I mean Mike and Mike Belshie's been talking about it for some while, right. I mean they now are registered, you know, if I remember correctly, it's you know, in Germany and and in Singapore. So you can basically, you know, start having different exposure in terms of geographies, you know, from your key management perspective. Now the problem you know, and and some knock about bit go at all, but I think you've brought it. We've we've talked about this. It's still a single entity exposure, right? So you can get geography exposure, you know, from different regulatory frameworks and different jurisdictions, but you still get a, you know, single entity exposure, which you know, may or may not be sub optimal depending on how you're looking at it. So being able to bring multiple jurisdictions regulated frameworks to the table. And you know, I, I think we could all argue that the UK, the US and Canada to some degree are good financial framework from a governance, you know, perspective in addition to minimizing single counterparty risk. I think it's not only really interesting, I think it's market leading and and you know, hopefully we'll bring a lot of attention. Yes, absolutely. And you know, I think in the Bitcoin community there's been talk for quite some time about how multi jurisdictional multi sig is, is going to be the future. So it's best in class. It's what everyone should strive for, but it hasn't been possible before now unless you set it up for yourself, right. So, you know, a lot of the time when people have been on on Bitcoin Twitter, when people talk about multi jurisdiction, multi sig, what they really mean is like flying to another country and setting up some sort of safe deposit box or, or, you know, burying it on foreign soil to have a key there. And then doing that in multiple, multiple countries such that they have a multi jurisdictional multi sig set up that they self custody set up that they've set up for themselves. But outside of that, there has not been any solution to date where you can have multi jurisdiction custody of your Bitcoin short of of having to go fly to that country and set it up for yourself. And this product is this partnership with Tetra in conjunction with our existing partnership with Bitco and Coin cover creates that first ever product where you have a key in in the US that's the Bitco key. That is, as Michael pointed out, the same sort of protection and security that is used for a couple of the ETFs that are using Bitco as their custodian. That's one key, that's the US key, then the the Canadian Tetra key and then the UK based coin cover key. And through that, that coordination, that partnership, you have a turn key best in class security, multi jurisdictional multi institution, multi sig setup. Whereas you know before that been completely untenable to to reach that level of excellence and and completeness by doing it yourself. Yeah. And maybe I would just add like a little bit of a history lesson here if I may, But part of the reason why you want multiple jurisdictional exposure or multi jurisdictional exposure is just look at gold. Look at, you know, the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. Look at when Roosevelt essentially for all intent and purpose outlawed self custody of gold and you know, required all Americans to basically start putting the custody of gold with the US Fed. Now I still know if today that, you know, there's a lot of Americans that hold their gold in Canada because Canada does not have that framework. So unless you're holding it, you know, under your mattress or you know personally, then you know, there is no way for you to do so with an institutional in the US. Just just take gold, replace it by Bitcoin. Now, can we say a scenario or can we see a scenario in a few years time where, you know, one specific jurisdiction government steps in basically says we are outlawing self custody of Bitcoin, all Bitcoin. Now it needs to be custody through the local central bank for whatever reason, right? It's not that far fetched. So actually it's happened in the past and could happen again. So minimizing your exposure, you're minimizing your exposure to a specific government. You know, changes in government happen all the time. I mean, you know, in the US you're, you're seeing hopefully or maybe a change of guard in, in the next little while, but that will also probably bring some change in narrative around, you know, digital assets, Bitcoin, Bitcoin support, etcetera at the government level. So being mindful of jurisdictional risk is incredibly important and quite frankly currently not enough part in the narrative for people that are holding large amounts of digital assets. Yeah, this has been a framework that we've talked about for a long time on this podcast and Marty, since like and I since like 2022. I think when some of these ideas were coming about. It's like nobody talked about the distribution of the keys in the same way they talk about distribution in the hash rate. And it sounds hyperbolic. What I like to say like the difference between gold and Bitcoin is effectively multi sake for that exact reason, DDA that you pointed out 'cause I, I sometimes hesitate to bring it out 'cause it sounds conspiratorial or whatever, but it's just this notion that once enough gold centralizes, it's just not a good thing for anybody. And so the notion of being able to distribute the asset is what makes this asset so redundant and resilient. And you get the transparency and all the things. And then the beauty of self custody is you could take the delivery of it at any point as that like fell safer alarm bell. So it's really, it's really an amazing kind of technology all around to approve assurances. I'm curious on your side, you mentioned some of the trends you've seen from we don't have to call out a country, but just the interest in Canadians regulatory, Canada's regulatory body for housing some assets from high net worths to wealth managers. How you see that coupled with also financial institutions participating in a setup like this, if you do at all, where maybe they do not step in to be, you know, build or buy custody, but they may either leverage a solution like this or hold one of the keys. I have thoughts and I've seen some stuff, but just curious if you thought about it from that landscape, that lens. Yeah, I have. And I, I would say it's probably safe to say that Tetra, you know, has pretty advanced conversation with a lot of FIS in Canada, you know, around digital assets, right. So to your point, like should they build, should they, you know, utilize a vehicle like Tetra, what's the framework? How do regulators think about it? You know, we're actively in contact with the regulators, even with government. So I was, you know, in Ottawa last week talking to the ministers of finance, you know, the various kind of government entities around digital assets, custody, why custody matters, etcetera. I can, I can say transparently because I, it, it's public information. I mean, my, my previous employer, they were working on a cold storage, you know, solution that essentially, you know, got shelled for various reasons. You know, one, you know, the operational nature of it, obviously it's, it's relatively complex. There's none of that native expertise in house, you know, it doesn't didn't really scale right, didn't really make a lot of sense. And specifically when you're looking at going beyond let's say a single asset in terms of support and then how do you scale the solution, you know, where the kind of roles and responsibility and risk lies. You know, there's, I would say different comments around the capacity for financial institutions to enter into this. I would say specifically in Canada, one of the issues that we we come up against is essentially that there's no federal framework for any of these institutions to basically touch this asset class. So because of the lack of framework, FIS are more likely to let's say look at partnering with various entities like Tetra then essentially do this themselves. But that poses, you know, the same risk we've discussed on this podcast for the last little while, which is essentially, you know, a single entity exposure, right? When you look at, you know, a large FI, you know, they might not want to just take exposure to Tetra to hold its digital assets. They might want to essentially have the opportunity to face multiple, you know, institutions in terms of protecting the digital assets. Now, I personally have a strong view on whether or not they're equipped to do this themselves. Having to work at at the largest players in the country. I would, you know, quite honestly say that I don't think they're equipped to handle this technology from a day-to-day perspective, you know, for various reasons. But you know, I think one of the obvious one, and we've talked about it then and Jesse, Jesse talked about it as well in the Inception story of the of why I joined Tetra. Essentially, the technology's not even there to actively monitor what's going on on chain, right? So for the lack of being able to even just plug in the systems into your current infrastructure means that you're unlikely to do it yourselves. So there are looking to partner, they are looking, you know, for various entities that can provide some assurances and not just the traditional kind of governance framework, but also, you know, assurances around minimizing single counterparty risk, minimizing jurisdictional risk, you know, minimizing technology risk even to some degree, right. You know, I think it would be unlikely to see somebody that's on the multi sig, you know, wanting to bag to let's just say one type of service and one type of technology. So they think about that from a risk perspective. I think they partner. I think they might look at, you know, people that can hold keys and hold assets for them, but I think they need a lot of assurances and multi jurisdictional, multi counterparty or multi institution and and multi tech I would say as well are probably all very strong selling points. And revenue, revenue, I think people don't recognize that every custodial solution effectively looks the same. So you can only charge so much for it. And there's a notion here where you, and we're experiencing it that you can actually charge for a product significant, you're not significantly, but with a greater market than 0, which is effectively existed for, you know, a private client and individual client or family office. That's a it's kind of a race. It's the, this notion or thesis that the market structure of digital assets is kind of grafted on the traditional market structure of compression from custody. And it's really kind of the opposite in our opinion, because when you think about it, the digital barrier asset that has so much room to appreciate, there's only 21 million that it's the one thing you should pay for if you want to get into the future and have that asset with the price appreciation exposed closure. And from our experience, you've probably seen a little bit of this. Financial institutions hesitate to jump in because they're like, how do I make money in this asset class? And when they see our model, they're effective. They're like, oh, wait, you can actually make money coupled with everything, you just share GDA. And an easy example is like additional insurances. Now you can underwrite, you can provide insurance that is an omnibus. Underwrite it and it's not saying Oh well if everything goes away like there people know that there's not enough even insurance capital to like map to mapping coin bases or insuring coin bases. Custody is, but you can change that dynamic when it's a single wallet and you can underwrite that multiple institutions have to basically fail or effectively fail on the relationship with that. It's a different relationship to underwrite. And so now you can give greater assurances to a financial institution coupled with increased revenue and all the other things you extract, you've shared. And now it makes it a lot more tenable for somebody to step in, which is just a, it's a, it's a very interesting thing that we've kind of like stumbled on as the more the conversations we've been having with institutions globally. And it's it's not really like a foreign type of relationship either with these institutions when you consider that they interface with broker dealers and clearing houses. I could see it being a very obviously not exactly the same, but a similar set up between Bitcoin custodial partners and these institutions, whether they're hedge funds, banks, whatever it may be. Yeah, that's right. And I, I think just overall, I mean, custody in Bitcoin has sort of been viewed as like a loss leader. Everybody's so, so focused on, on gaining market share in terms of exchange volume because that's where people make the upfront revenue. Every time somebody makes a trade in exchange or service gets a percentage of that, usually about 1%. And that's, you know, that's where they're making their money. And as a result of that, custody is an afterthought. It's been a commodity as Michael said, it's been sort of everybody does it the same way. You can't really charge for it because there's no value addition. There's people aren't providing value in the type of custody that they include in their exchange service typically. But with multi institution custody, this becomes much more value added form of custody because it really does increase the probability that you're going to effectively propagate those assets into the future, which is the whole point here, being able to hold on to this call option of major upside in the future. If you know, we're right about how big of a role Bitcoin can grow into in in the financial landscape and in, you know, warranty backed insurance is on on your transactions is a big part of that model. And inheritance planning is a big part of that model. These things are possible with multi institution custody as value additions that are not are not really possible with this typical exchange models. Or we just throw it in a cold storage wallet the same way that everybody else does. And you know, it's not that sexy. So let's not talk about it and let's not charge you for it. You know what, I think we really are moving to it to a different to a future where people appreciate the the value addition of multi institution custody over a typical single third party custodian model where it's kind of a black box. Yeah, I I would also add quickly, you know the partners that you select and the businesses they play in. Jesse, to your point is also is also, you know, should be considered as a criteria. And what I really mean by that is like Tetra is a pureplay test fee provider, right? Like we don't do anything else. And and you know, I think Michael, to your point, there's, there's currently a lot more value to be generated and you know, transactional businesses or etcetera. But we strongly believe that over time, you know, people will want to pay a specific price to protect their assets, you know, because that is fundamental into, you know, for Bitcoin, you know, there's entities obviously globally that played massive roles in custody, but also land margin, trade clear and settle, I mean the list goes on and on. So you basically open a lot of risks to your underlying assets when you're working with these providers. And you know, something was touched upon earlier around the segregation of, of, of assets or segregation of wallets. I mean, Texas has been segregated from day one, right? Our infrastructure has always been segregated in, in cold storage. There is no omnibus accounts that's behind what we do in none of our clients assets are are essentially sitting in an omnibus structure. And unfortunately when you commingle services, you end up having to commingle assets as well. So while, you know, you might do some review of let's say a specific custodian that will tell you that your assets are segregated and that you can also transact through their system. Then then through the transactional business, your assets end up being commingled. You know, whether it'd be for, you know, a handful of seconds or longer, you know, to clear and settle and transact. So those should also be considerations. Again, it gets to a little bit more of a technical understanding of what really happens behind the door and how assets are positioned. But you know to to the best of the clients capacity, they should consider the various institutions that custody the assets and the role they play in the ecosystem and try to purify that as much as possible. Yeah. And it's it's incredible because it reminds me a lot of when we used to compete with Block Fi and our loans were nominally a little bit higher, but we say risk adjusted, it's much cheaper. And it reminds me of what we're talking about here. And it's kind of kind of scary how coincidental this happens to be the week of maybe we can, you know, I know we have about 15 minutes left talk about the conference and all the different conversations that are going on with Treasury in the US state, the US level, everything's happening globally. It's like, imagine when you start to really move this asset gets to six figures and how, how are we going to do custody, right? Like, you know, up until this, we know people have been working on it and more people are working on it. But this notion of just sending it all to Coinbase is, is not a good strategy. And I think people are even know that now. But what happens when the price double S because that's you know that that means more people are exposed, but that's more Bitcoin as well that they're accumulating just a very fascinating time to this is all going to like I think in future state look like obvious, but right now we're kind of like at the edges of this stuff. Yeah. And I mean, one thing that I would mention or to consider is, you know, as the asset prices have recovered and doubled and the ETFs and the US launched and everybody basically went to a single counterparty pretty much to do custody, their asset balances blew up, but their insurance, their governance and their framework stayed the same, right? So to your point, Mike, you ended up taking additional risk without knowingly doing so to some degree. You know, I think some of the latest figure is 340 billion or so of assets that are, you know, sitting at Coinbase, but they still only have 350 million of insurance. So the, you know, from, from insurance versus underlying asset standpoint, you know, you have increased your risk quite dramatically of, of keeping your assets essentially there. And it's certainly something that people would consider or should consider when they're thinking about custody or they thinking about, you know, locating, you know, their assets with a single counterparty. Yeah, there's a discussion of trillion dollar wallets and this is naturally obviously squint, this is just the start, but you can imagine different continents, different financial institutions, different balance sheets. And like we talked about this early and it sounded crazy and it's kind of strange to see it happening. This is good dates back to the call 2022. But the notion of Coinbase and other firms having to participate in a model like this, I believe they will have to and increasingly believe they will have to because large scale institutions either want to leg into the asset class or firms like MicroStrategy that I guess it's like roughly 20 billion price double s. Now they're 40 billion. Let's say a third of their assets are at Coinbase and they say, hey, we're going to move. Unless you adopt something like this and participate, whether it's a net new client like multiple pensions go into a State Street and asking them to participate or existing incumbents that have a singular view and kind of not Moat, but kind of a Moat. That mode is only as as strong as a click of a button. Maybe it's a little harder with Coinbase and sometimes they make it really hard where you can't pull your assets out. But the point being that if you move your assets, eventually the market has to participate. And so I personally have had this long standing view that this will be a standard in a future state when it comes to like institutions will not be able to have unilateral control over the asset. Now how quick that happens is really the question on how much the market, you know, requires or demands it, I think. I think, I think you're oh, sorry, I think you're going to see tensions. I think you're going to see pensions in large organizations starting to demand control, right? I think it's, it's the natural evolution here. I mean, you looked at those. I was looking at BlackRock over the weekend. I think there are 21 billion now, right? How long before they start asking for, you know, potentially being one of the pieces of the quorum for Coinbase, right? If it's a set up of seven of 12 or 7 of 10 or or whatever the quorum is, right? How long before BlackRock says, well, actually I want one operator to be part of the quorum for any transaction? I think it, it definitely will need to happen. I think there's going to be diversification, but I think they're going to also demand to be included, you know, in the key control specifically for large organizations, pension funds, you know, sovereign wealth, etcetera. It just, it just doesn't make any sense and they're they're not going to take exposure to any single counterparty on this technology. It wouldn't pass the risk assessments. It's fascinating that MicroStrategy isn't there yet because they're a tech company. We've talked about this for years like that. It's kind of weird, right, that you would outsource. Like Michael Saylor couldn't figure out the people within his network to trust more than the institutions. He let that hold the Bitcoin because you could set up what we're talking about here within an entity as well. I mean, and this is what we talked about last week with Alex from Coin Covers. You have to hope as an individual, as an operator in the space that the institutions that have exposure to large amounts of Bitcoin recognize this before we have another Quadriga, another Mount G Ox, another Block 5 Celsius, FTX. Name the blow up throughout Bitcoin's history like that, especially as the stakes get higher because every doubling from here, I mean, if we double from here, we're adding another $1.4 trillion in market cap and the the stakes just increase exponentially as a price goes up. And so, I mean, that's part of the reason why we do this show and why the word education has been mentioned so many times throughout this conversation, is because there is like a moral obligation to make people aware of these options and get them over to them as quickly as possible to mitigate any of these potential blow UPS in the future. Because they are just going to get larger and create bigger headaches for the industry at large. This feels like a trip down memory lane because when Jesse and I were chatting and already like back in 2022 about all this stuff, the key inflection point was like seeing the the smartest people in the room weren't the smartest people. And then the existing market structure, nothing really changed. Obviously there's, so there's more regular, there's more regulatory hurdles requirements, which is naturally better for, you know, depending on the assurances required. But then the underlying tech is still the same with a single entity having unilateral control. And you can even have all the best regulations like we saw with Nevada and whatever happened with the trust charters with prime trust. But it doesn't matter from a technical perspective if you lose the assets, if you're leveraging MPC and all the other things. And so to Marty's point, the sad part is I'm pretty confident like we're still going to see orders of magnitude more hard that we saw in 2022 because the numbers are going to get bigger. And I believe it's effectively the same infrastructure because what we're doing is still so new that the market has to catch up to it. But the hope is like you go into the next, you know, 2028 ETFs are larger and this is demanded by the SEC and other requirements. And we talked to the ETF providers, they call it bulletproof. It's just the, it's again, it melt the exact quote. It's bulletproof, but it melts brains. Yeah. Yeah, Michael, to your point, I mean, you know, in, in industry and a nascent, a nascent industry, a nascent asset class only develops if you learn from the failures that happen along the way. And and so like Quadriga, Mount Gox, all these, you know, FTX, all these failures, they only help us make this asset part of the financial fabric of, of the world if we learn from them and, and take the those learnings and incorporate them into better products and better solutions. And yeah. And that's multifaceted too, because obviously at the end of the day, you you protect the end clients and the consumers. But it also, I think it's imperative because you basically show regulators that we know how to self regulate and reduce the potential for regulators to come in with overbearing regulation. Like we're able to actually self regulate and educate and move people over to this as quickly as possible. Maybe regulators look at those. They're like, yeah, these guys are actually responsible. And there's some people in that industry, despite what the public and many pundits may say, that actually know what they're talking about and do care about securing people's wealth. Yeah. And to to Michael's point, I I fear that our educational efforts will not outpace the appreciation of of of the the value held in Coinbase for example, you know like it DDA, I didn't know that stat. They have $350 million of insurance on what would you say $340 billion of digital assets that Coinbase. It's 1% of their assets. It's one thousandth of their assets, which is outrageous. And I mean, talk about ticking time bomb. If like if you want to, if you want to, if you were going to take a holistic assessment of like existential risk to this industry and, and you were going to, you know, find all the all the ways in which something calamitous could happen. Coinbase is is has got to be top of that list in terms of some internal failure or perhaps the 61 O2 sort of scenario happening. If you have a a single third party custodian that has unilateral control over that many assets and and you know that much market share in the ETF space in particular, and that only gets worse as the price appreciates. And you know, Didi, I think you have a great point there that their systems and controls are not scaling, are not are not necessarily going to scale as the price appreciates. Yeah, I mean I, you know, I. And Marty has some. Great. Yeah, I was going to say I, I, I, I I have so much to say on this topic. Unfortunately, I have to be careful what I say publicly, but any industry that has so much concentration typically leads to a very poor outcome, right? I think there's a lot, a lot of analogy that we can say around what's being done right now by actor, like an actor like Coinbase. And you can draw parallels to like Microsoft in the 70s and 80s and dumping into markets and pricing. And you know, you know, on the custody front, I can tell you, we see them being incredibly aggressive on pricing and you know, it's very hard for other entities that are pure place to, to compete on that front. You know, if you look at your own ETFs and, and this is a statistic that, you know, Brian Armstrong has said himself publicly, they have about 90% of the volume out of the ETFs in the US. So not necessarily you know, the number of entities they control versus a live ETS, but the amount of assets it's it's about 90%. There are also the largest player in Canada. They've been gathering a lot of market share in Europe. I know Australia just launched a couple of ATS all custody with Coinbase. So I mean, you look at, you know, the systemic it's, it really is becoming a systemically important institution or FI or as other would want to position it as systemic risk into the system. And I think that's something very, very important to consider. And, and to to certainly we can't underestimate, I mean, the point around insurability. Unfortunately, insurance remains a very difficult piece to get in the industry. There's only certain pools that we'll give to let's say digital assets and most of them are already kind of fully allocated. But with products like on ramp is is working on with multi, you know, institution multi jurisdictional exposure, then you know, the the hope is that you will be able to bring essentially more insurability, more coverage, more underwriting into the marketplace and essentially reduce that risk. We shouldn't kid ourselves like digital assets currently as it stands has a lot of single counterparty risk. And also, I mean, we didn't touch on this and I know we're close to time, but also a lot of risk around banking obviously in banking services, which continues to be a problem in the industry. Yeah, I was just referencing Marty on TFTC has a lot of investigative journalism into Coinbase and some of their custodial efforts with Zappo and and you know the history there that I think is important for anybody to listen to. And just what DDO was referencing to the aspect of the larger Coinbase gets, the more likely that it is for something negative to happen. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be something crazy as a 61O2. It's just a larger honeypot and larger honeypots naturally have larger, greater attack surface, more, more vectors or more individuals looking at them. And so I think that's an important thing. And then the only other thing to mention on that is the only way to to win in something like that is to play a different game. And that's effectively what we're talking about here is that the asset is fundamentally different and the existing models of financial services and digital assets have been grafted on the existing model, which is effectively you have a single entity that holds the asset, you have a single entity that sells the asset. And what we're introducing is a different version where you leverage the native protocol which is multi sig. Native aspects of the protocol, multi sig and you don't have to require a single entity to have unilateral control. And that changes the dynamic of custody and then also additional financial services that can be figured out. But ultimately custody is that the base layer? Because we're still, you know, we're not even at 100K yet. We all know we have so much more room to go. Yeah. And I think tying two things that were said throughout this conversation together to really get this idea proliferating through the institutions is, I mean, Michael, you used the example of Unchained offering higher interest rate loans compared to Blockfy and people didn't understand that. Well, it's like the the risk is much higher on Blockfy, so you're actually paying a much higher price if they blow up, which ultimately happened. I think similarly Didier with what you mentioned in terms of like being a pureplay custodian and trying to compete with Coinbase on fees. It's going to be very hard considering the scale and the different business lines that they have. But it's really trying to price that unknown risk for end clients where yes, they may have cheaper custody fees, but it's actually much more expensive in the long run due to this insane concentration risk that exists within Coinbase. Yeah. And we actually also, Marty, to your point like we also get there as well by jurisdictional diversification, right? So, you know, it's a huge selling point for us as, as you know, being able to say your keys are in Canada, they're secured under, you know, a Canadian regulated entity with a clear framework. It's not, you know, trust us, we have 14 shards or 12 shards, whatever the number is spread out globally. It's like, no, here's the framework, here's how they're controlled, here's the governance overlaying. You know, there's some transparency, some trust that's built over that and some verification as well. That's able to be done to some degree, but we're we're, we're competing on jurisdictional risk as well. Very good point. And I want to again, apologize for being tardy to this, to this episode, to this recording. It was a pleasure speaking with you, Didier. This is fascinating stuff. Pumped. I mean, by the time this airs, the announcement will have been made. So Congrats on really pushing this ball forward. And it's something like Michael said and Jesse, Michael and I have been talking about for years, like this is where the ball is going to end up inevitably. So the more we can push it as quickly as possible, the better in my mind, because I think this is desperately needed considering all the tailwinds that are coming our way, which is a good thing. But we we need to mitigate any unforeseen disasters in the future with with models like this. Yeah, we have an exciting panel with DDA, Mike, Belshi, Jesse and Alex talking about these concepts at the Institutional Day. Great to hash this out in here. It'll be it'll be good to hear Mike talk about, you know, the different countries, but under Beko and then this approach and the his thoughts there. Yeah. Now we're, we're very excited. We we certainly appreciate the partnership. We think this is again like just market leading in terms of the approach and you know, we think there's definitely a need for it in the marketplace. So we're we're happy to be your partners and we appreciate the opportunity and look forward to to pushing this together. Yeah, awesome. We're we're thrilled about it. You know, like I said before, I think, I think it's probably hard to really point your finger at just how significant of a milestone this is. I think in in the evolution of Bitcoin custody. But with Tetra, we now have the 1st instance of a true multi jurisdiction, multi institution, multi sig custody set up available for people today. It's called M. Cubed for short. Is that what we're going to go with? Yeah, at some point we need some shorter description descriptions, but it, you know, there's so much happening under the hood, it's hard to. M ^3 m ^3 custody, It's comes off the tongue much. Better. I do like that. Maybe we'll end up with that. Well, gentlemen, I look forward to seeing you all in Nashville. My flight leaves early tomorrow morning from the East Coast. We'll we'll have to all get together. Yeah, absolutely. We'll coordinate. Looking forward to seeing everybody. All right guys, have a good rest of your day. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that on Ramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit on rampbitcoin.com/contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private Client advisors.
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