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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 extra ever assembled in the history of gutless 1974198792972000. And whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we sell. Hey, OK. I say when we sell. Everyone, welcome back to the last trade. This week we have Sam Baker, who is a research analyst, a River. Sam authored an excellent report that was just recently published on corporate Bitcoin adoption. So we'll be diving into that report among other themes and topics that we've seen in the industry recently. Of course, today joined by my Co host Michael Tanguma and Jesse Myers. Good to see everyone. How's everyone doing today? Good and well. Sam, appreciate you making some time. Good to meet you. And maybe before we get into the report, let's just hear a little bit about your background. I saw that you before joining River earlier this year, you previously worked at Galaxy and I believe City, if, if I recall correctly. So we'd love to just hear about your background in the traditional finance space. It sounds like some other crypto Bitcoin native firms as well. And ultimately, what led you led you to River would be a great place to start. Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. Great to meet all of you. As for some background on myself, I went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole in college. I was going down the I guess investment banking trajectory at Boston College and during that period I found Bitcoin. And so my, my first job out of college was at City. I worked in their digital assets group, so very blockchain focus, not so much Bitcoin as much as I wished. And and then I spent about two years at Galaxy, primarily in their trading business, but also working on some of the other products related to Bitcoin mining and asset management. And then earlier this year, I jumped over to River. It was really great to finally be working for a a Bitcoin focus company and right now I'm focused on research. So most recently put out the report on business Bitcoin adoption, but we'll be putting out reports a couple times a year. That's awesome. It's a good, it's an interesting, you know, on the Bitcoin side because there's only so many companies to work for. So generally kind of have to do a hop and then kind of get into it. A curious like any learnings or big themes from like Galaxy in particular that helps as like you move directly into Bitcoin and that influence you know the report because I know they're pretty well regarded shop as well. Yeah, for for sure Galaxy's very institutional focused where I would say River is more focused on retail and smaller to medium sized businesses. So at Galaxy, we really got to see a lot of the, a lot of the big movers in the market. I was there over the last bear market and so got to see first hand from the trading desk the blow UPS of Luna 3 AC block fi FTX was was sitting on the trading floor. When you know, Galaxy took a big hit during FTX, but it was also a great opportunity because of, you know, how thin the, the, the liquidity was that week. I actually also learned a lot working at Citi, just learning a little bit about how banks are viewing Bitcoin or just blockchain more broadly as an opportunity and a threat. And one of the things I took away from that is I think banks are actually more focused on CBDC's as a threat to their business model in so far as it would take away their deposits. And so I would say just like if you want to, if you want to know a little bit about how the the largest banks out there are like thinking about blockchain, they're actually really thinking about CBDC's as opposed to Bitcoin. So I found that experience like they're very interesting. That's fascinating. It's so funny how you know, crypto and CBDC's provide the sort of air cover for Bitcoin to continue to develop and mature for long enough before before the world, well, the powers that be realized that Bitcoin is actually the thing that that they should have been worried about all along. At On Ramp, 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. Tell us more about that. So like in a bank environment, did you see like decks going around about, you know, how CDC's are threat, how we, how we as a bank can get around this, you know, efforts we can take to lobby against it or perhaps innovate our way around CDC's? What was that like? Yeah. So I, I guess the way I would divide up any digital assets group at a bank would be between and I'm going to say a lot of words that you might cringe at, but CBD, CS, private blockchains, crypto, and then enterprise blockchain. And the the private blockchain and enterprise blockchain sides of things are things that these banks have been working on for years and years, sometimes over a decade, and they haven't really materialized in any way. Basically like an intranet, right? Yeah, yeah. Or like trying to address trade finance because a lot of the banks are at the center of trade finance, which is a multi trillion dollar industry. With regard to CBD CS, I think the way a lot of the banks are trying to position themselves is at the center of the infrastructure. So City, for example, helped manage the release of the CBDC in, in Nigeria, and so they were very involved with the central bank there. One, one thing that listeners could read up on if they're interested is like City released this concept called the regulated liability network, which is basically like a private blockchain run by banks that countries could issue their own CBDC on top of. And like making that sort of model, I think would allow the banks to still have some sort of business model to extract revenues on top of the CBDC, which is preferable to just them being totally worked around from a government. And then as a regard to crypto, I would say the banks haven't really done anything in the space. The most they can do is like you see, you know, Goldman and JP or the APS for a lot of the ETFs, they've always explored issuing products like lending backed by Bitcoin, But you usually have a very high turnover rate of people that actually care about Bitcoin working at the banks. When I left city on the same day, there were 17 other people that like we were all Bitcoiners and we all left because we knew that, you know, no matter how much effort you put into kind of pushing the bank in the right direction, it wasn't going to materialize in anything. And so as a result, you kind of have just very high turnover rate of people that actually understand the space leaving into Bitcoin focused or just like companies in the space, custodians, trading houses, exchanges. It's an. Amazing point that that the brain drain from traditional institutions to Bitcoin makes it so that the institutions are perpetually unequipped with bitcoiners. It's a funny point. It's what I've seen without throwing any other names out there from the biggest regarded institutions that are in Bitcoin, they everyone leaves because it's just too slow. Like, and I think Jesse, this kind of ties into what we've talked about where I've increasingly becoming convinced that the incumbents just won't catch up because by the time they get to something, something else exists, It's like we have a whole investment fund literally titled this like early riders, because the incumbents will refuse to adopt the most disruptive technology. So it'll take the early people that will find it and then build the net new companies because it's just and I think like we see this with AI as well. When you think about the amount of censorship that exists, like you can't like it disrupts the existing model of your solution. If the models are giving everything from an AI perspective, so you have to censor it, well, that's not the best product. And ultimately it's somebody that's net new going to build that in the same way, like when you think about what river is doing or or on ramp, you have to like build things from the ground up that are native to the asset. And sometimes those things are not conducive to the existing legacy model of your whole other business is the whole just wrote Innovator's Dilemma, like right, you know, so that makes complete sense that people leave. I mean, yeah, like there, there are more regulators specialized on regulating JP Morgan than there actually are people on the trading floor of JP Morgan. So if you just think about that, it's like pretty impossible to move forward. There's one exception in the large traditional finance space, which is Fidelity, and that's because Abby Johnson is, I would say, a very outspoken Bitcoiner. And so when when you can have an exception like that, maybe Cantor Fitzgerald would be another example. When you have the one like CEO that came from the top down to move things forward, I think there's a glimmer of hope. But yeah, otherwise I'm I'm not too optimistic on, you know, banks offering Bitcoin products anytime soon. See. Everybody. Before pivoting, because I know we have a jam packed agenda with the, the business side, but I'm curious your thoughts on where like, you know, I think Bitco just came out with their whatever USDCS or, or whatever it is, the token, their, their, their stable coin. And then there's a conversation with Wyoming and having their sovereign backed stable. Where do these like almost private banking dollars play into that stack that you reference, which is like, you know, the CBDC, there's the tethers of the world and like, how does that plan? Because like, I guess these banks can issue their own dollars. It's because they're kind of an interesting spot. Yeah, when, when I was at City, that was over two years ago and this is when the stable coin market cap was maybe 1/5 of what it is right now. And so it, it, it was part of the conversation, but not nearly to the extent that I would imagine it is right now. And so to be honest with you, I'm, I'm not entirely sure how banks would play into that. I, I would guess that they would be for, they should be jumping on top of it because it would allow them to, I mean, at the very least they should be cussing the, the, the assets that are collateralizing these stable coins because that's, that's kind of the only way that they can fit in. Sam, appreciate you sharing those perspectives and I find it interesting, you know a couple of the trad Fi organizations you mentioned like Fidelity or now Cantor Fitzgerald. In a lot of ways it does need, it does require a level of sophistication from the top to drive Bitcoin, not crypto or enterprise blockchain, private block, all the buzzwords that you threw out there, right? And it's interesting because most of these firms seem to be mired in it. One quick anecdote is Michael and I have had some conversations with some Swiss private banks and it's interesting to see it might be a combination of their low time preference thinking of both the institutions and also the end clients. Like these are institutions that have been around over 150 years and they also focus on generational wealth, right? And they've effectively seen multiple generations of their clientele preserve and grow wealth over time. And now they have fortunately a couple of Bitcoiners that are kind of sitting within the innovation lab there that really deeply understand Bitcoin, have been in it for over a decade. And it requires like that type of it requires that type of knowledge and individual to push forward within an organization. I also think it comes down to that like a Swiss bank has very low time preference versus a Wall Street firm maybe just looking to beat on quarterly earnings right quarter after quarter. So there is something about maybe just these different financial institutions require, it requires both the leadership and the knowledge around Bitcoin, but then also just how incentives are aligned throughout that organization. I appreciate you sharing those perspectives. So I'm curious, like before getting into the report itself, maybe you could just share, you know, the impetus for writing the report. I was picking through it this week. It was very well done, extremely comprehensive, a lot of interesting data points, way more than we'll even be able to get into through this conversation. So folks will be able to check it out after the fact. But how did you and the team kind of decide on focusing on business adoption as a report and why is kind of now a good time to be looking into that? Sure. So we, we decided to put out the report for a couple of reasons, both selfishly and trying to just benefit the rest of the space. I would say from reverse perspective, we've been serving a lot more business clients over the past few years. That number is now in excess of 1000. And so just seeing that growth in that demand from businesses made us look into, OK, like what what materials are out there to help business owners understand the role that Bitcoin could play on their balance sheet or or otherwise. And there aren't that many resources out there. When you look at business Bitcoin adoption, just in terms of the headlines, I think it, it's very easy to get drawn into focusing on micro strategy or some of the other companies that are just making huge moves, which is great to see, but it's not that replicable to smaller businesses, family run businesses. And so we wanted to really open people's eyes to the breadth of business Bitcoin adoption. If you look at Bitcoin adoption more broadly over the past, I would say year or so, you can divide up the holders into, you know, individuals, businesses, institutions and nation states. And from the beginning of this year at least, I, I don't see retail or individuals driving that price higher, driving Bitcoin adoption. It, it, it really is coming down to businesses and institutions right now. And maybe later in the cycle we'll get a lot more interest from retail. Yeah, yeah. This is the the perfect chart to show. And so we, we just wanted to highlight the state of business, Bitcoin adoption, where where it's coming from, and then provide as many resources as possible to equip business owners to at least consider the role that Bitcoin could play. Yeah, that's excellent. This is such an awesome way to highlight ownership and distribution and there's a lot of themes I want to touch on and I know the group does here too. I'm curious for the clients. So you mentioned over 1000 clients, a river business clients, which is remarkable and Congrats on the success there. I'm curious like do those folks typically sign up first as individuals and then bring their businesses in? Or are you seeing a lot of businesses reach out direct without maybe the individuals already being Bitcoiners and wanting to sign up and understand the merits of Bitcoin treasury strategy? Yeah, yeah, good question. Many of them did start off as individuals as as individual clients and then they brought their business on. And I would say, you know, a majority of the remainder were companies that are, you know, small to medium sized businesses that had an existing, I would say Bitcoin champion within their company. That either was a river client or a client somewhere else and was just pounding the table on implementing some sort of Bitcoin strategy for a while and then finally won over, you know, the management or the key stakeholders to finally like on board and buy Bitcoin. Makes a makes a lot of sense. I appreciate you calling out the, you know, there's the folks that get the headlines in the space, but then there's like real applicable stuff in the real world where I personally like gravitate towards when we think about inflation and margin compression because of it, because people have to raise prices and it's not just raising prices and consistently maintaining the same revenue, less clients or less individuals are able to buy those services. And so it really matters for the longevity of a business to be able to have a better form of money to store. So it's, it's cool to see you guys leading that charge and the number of clients you have because it's more tangible. And I like the case studies that were in there with Peony and Tahinis that have been around for a while. And it, that also maps very directionally. So I was previously at Unchained and, and worked with a lot of small businesses or businesses. And what you described is exactly kind of how it looked. It was a private, it was an individual client that then onboarded their business or their friend told them. And what was fascinating that it's kind of like tied into those case studies that most people don't. It makes sense, but they're never like explained. It is, it's always people in the real economy that are feeling inflation that gravitate towards Bitcoin. It's like there's some notion of proof of work when you're out. And this is like a kind of a symptom also of athletes and firefighters getting it. It's like you have this like shelf life and you're out there and you kind of know there's only so much time and then you also see these things happening. And so it like it's a very interesting thing how bitcoins such an emergent technology, that's the people at the edges that feel it. They have to find it. And then it kind of moves up into the stack when it comes to the corporations. And you have all these boards that are like, it's OK, it's OK because they're getting their share buybacks and all the things versus the people that are on the front lines that they need to. So it plays very nicely into that report that I feel like that's probably a lot of what you see today and it'll grow overtime. But like, that's the emergent part of Bitcoin on the business side. Right. Yeah. So 33% of companies in the US, over 10 millionaire family run. And I think when you have a family run business that that means a lot more than just being ACEO or the CFO at a publicly traded company where you get your stock options every quarter and you get your payout. Like for a family run business, it's very much a savings account or a store of wealth that can be passed on. From generation to generation. And so I think these business owners are looking at it with a lot more care than maybe a, a, a much larger CFO and a different time preference as well. Like for, for a publicly traded company, you're, you're focused on the next quarter, two quarters. You know, maybe you, you, you have a slightly longer time horizon, but you know that that's going to incentivize you to focus much more on like mitigating risk over the next six months. Whereas when you have a family run organization like that, wealth matters for longer than your own lifetime. And so I think that's why we've seen a lot of demand from both small businesses and like family run entities. Yeah, I mean, that's such a great point. Sam and Michael too, just around the grassroots nature of Bitcoin and really just becoming like a survival of the fittest type of technology, right where people seek it out, maybe not even because they want to, but because at some point it becomes a need for them to do so. And I thought this was like a, this is a really powerful chart because it's not like any of us are advocating for businesses to be dumping, you know, 100% of their cash reserves into Bitcoin. Like that could present challenges in and of itself, but even just allocating 3% to Bitcoin in the past four years has on inflation just return basis is vastly outperformed holding it in dollars, right? And most people still seem to think that the dollar is a reliable and stable currency, but the four of us know that over time it's been depreciated at a greater clip. And I think, like you just kind of hit the nail on the head where for family businesses, you're not just kind of collecting a paycheck, right? Like this is your livelihood. This is the way that you put food on the table for your spouse and for your children. And there's such a greater need at that point to seek out alternatives to actually preserve and grow your wealth versus having it constantly drained and having to then, you know, compromise maybe on the quality of your business or increasing passing costs on to your customers. So it makes a ton of sense and that that's where you're seeing a lot of the adoption. Well, in a good, a good example of this, like I always think about this notion of like we know we can't have an upside down balance sheet as individuals or you get put in cuffs or bankruptcy and all the things associated, but everyone else is allowed to do it. And Jackson, if you can find the chart with Apple, because that was one that kind of ties into this is like, I think it was 15 billion. And like, I guess they're unrealized, but it's via, you know, forget what page it was, but you'll see the the chart that pops up of like losses because of the loss of purchasing power. That if that was our personal balance sheet, like we would never accept that. But nobody talks about it. And if you scroll up, one click, I think, Yeah. And one more, I think, sorry, Yeah, maybe it's the other one, but there was a. I'll find it for you, yeah. And Sam, when you're when you're doing these calculations are you're using the official CPI numbers. So assume or. Yeah, yeah. So I'm being generous with the CPI numbers, but maybe, maybe, maybe it might. Be worse than that. Yeah, yeah, I think the way so, so Lynn Alden recently put out an article on corporate finance and the role that Bitcoin could play. And she took a little bit of of a different perspective. It was a great article, but she looked at the, the rate of monetary inflation and not consumer price inflation. And I think as a business, that might be a better way of looking at it because at the end of the day, you, your, your goal is not to get diluted in terms of the, the size of the money supply. And so really your benchmark should be, you know, either either the stock index that you're in or, you know, M2 at the very least. Yeah, yeah. That that's a we feel passionately about that, or at least I certainly do that the best barometer for true inflation, unless someone can can prove to me that there's a better metric out there is just M2 growth. And the capital markets access is a big one as well, because when you're able to get access to cheap debt, it changes the whole survival game that we're talking about versus when you can't, you have to find the best tool to stay alive. And that's. And then it's also easier when you can make the decision versus the standard. Yeah, this is the 15 billion in 10 years, like this is everybody's personal balance sheet as well. Yeah. No, it's, it's so true. I mean, again, like not surprising Sam, I would love for you to correct me if I'm wrong, but it was like something it might have been over 90% of the businesses that have adopted Bitcoin with River were less than 5 stakeholders or something, right, needed to approve that Is that, is that right or generally around there? It's, it's somewhere in the range of 9095% of foreign business clients required less than 5 stakeholders to approve a Bitcoin purchase decision. And the reason we, we wanted to find out that stat is just learning more about how much governance plays a role in making a decision like adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet. And so these these smaller companies do have a first mover advantage because if you have someone in the company that can champion Bitcoin and you can make that decision, it's a lot easier than being at a multi billion dollar public company where you have to, you know, get approval from your whole board. And then you have to spend months finding, you know, all the all the third parties that you're going to deal with. So yeah, props, huge props to Micro Strategy and Block and some of the other large companies for getting that done because it is not easy to do. Did you, did you guys happen to look into how many of those businesses really only needed one person to to make that decision? I would I would guess it's a high number. Yeah, yeah, I think we did ask that question and it it was a high number, yeah. I wouldn't be able to give you it off the top of my head, but yeah, yeah. Yeah. Speaking of MicroStrategy at back in 2020, you know, the four of us remember very well just in terms of that initial announcement being made. And I feel like there was there obviously was so much excitement around it. And I think there was also way more anticipation of other publicly traded stocks or companies doing that as well. And maybe you know, four years later, I'll speak for myself. I'm a little bit surprised that there that we've seen a slower rate of adoption among public companies. But Sam, one of the things that you put in the report that I thought was interesting was a, a table that compared, I guess you would call them like four key pillars or four parts of market structure that are needed for treasury assets, right? So there's liquidity, regulatory and accounting, institutional acceptance and precedent. And I thought this was a great chart that you threw together just to highlight how much has changed in the matter of four years. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts if you share the sentiment that you're surprised that MicroStrategy hasn't really been followed by too many other companies. And when you look at this chart, like, what do you think is most important? Do you think any of these play more of a role than others? Be curious to hear your thoughts, you know looking back for years compared to where we are today. Yeah, great questions. I, I would also love to hear your guys's thoughts on MicroStrategy because, yeah, it's just a fascinating case study. So as, as much as we could talk about liquidity or accounting or, you know, regulatory, I, I really think the most important of these 4 categories is precedent. Because all these companies are, you know, at the end of the day, like you could think of them as sheep and everyone is still following this traditional corporate finance treasury playbook. And so as soon as you have a critical mass of businesses that are starting to look at Bitcoin or other assets as a diversifier against inflation, I think that's going to do more than anything else. And for the other categories, it's just I, I think it's a binary of, you know it, we're, we're, we're liquid enough. So 10 Xing the liquidity from here is not going to be a huge needle mover. Same with the accounting like the accounting standards are fairly clear at this point. So I I don't think that we could have much more progress in that regard. So yeah, I do think precedent is the most important As for micro strategy, So I I don't really know where to start. I might go on a little bit of a rant. I think micro strategies example is very unique and I don't see I don't see their playbook being replicated at least in US capital markets all that much. I think their their strategy is A1. It is A1 company take all approach because they've established themselves as the most liquid issue like company that can take advantage of capital markets to buy Bitcoin. Yesterday they announced the pricing of convertible notes. I don't know if you guys saw that $875 million at at less than 1% interest rate and so. 65 bits I think, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so their ability to take advantage of the demand from bondholders and take advantage of the volatility that's priced into their stock is a, a, a first mover advantage. And the larger they get, the more they're going to be able to do that. I think where you will see other companies follow the explicit micro strategy playbook is in other capital markets like Metaplanet in Japan. Maybe you'll get another company doing the same thing in, in Europe or Hong Kong, but I, I don't see too many more like similar scientifics doing that. And the main reason why is because I don't think companies will get rewarded all that much in the future for having too much of their business trade off of the value of Bitcoin as opposed to their underlying cash flows. Michael, were you going to say something? No, I think it's spot on. Nobody talks about this. There's all these companies doing their Spacs and this stuff, and it's just like there's what you describe the liquidity, but also the underlying cash flows of micro strategy help protect it from the debt that's owed. And nobody else has that. So you can get wiped out if the market corrects, which is just how everybody gets wiped out when they use leverage in Bitcoin. But nobody says what you just said. So yeah, it's spot on. I kind of have the same sentiment. But I think, yeah, I think that if, if, if another company that had positive cash flows in the US or many of them tried to put, you know, 50% of their enterprise value in the Bitcoin, then they would get some sort of conglomerate discount from the market. Because so every investor in micro strategy knows that they're getting exposure to Bitcoin leveraged. But, but if, if, if Apple were to put 50% or 100% of their treasury in the Bitcoin and their cash flows were, were much lower, they would get a, a like they would be punished by the market for doing that. Because you would have all these investors that are looking for the cash flows of Apple. And now they have to also include the, the price performance of Bitcoin as well. I mean, personally, I would love to see Apple do that. That'd be awesome. But I don't think too many companies are going to do that. And you're going to have a lot more that are just going to take a measured approach to allocating three or five or 10% of their balance sheet to Bitcoin. Yeah, I think that's right. I think I think you're right too that like Japan, China, Europe, maybe a a few other capital markets could have their own version of MicroStrategy. But you're right, it's kind of a singular play and and a coincidence of a lot of things that needed to line up of Michael Saylor had control of the company. So he could make this decision after reading the Bitcoin standard, you know, like that's the amount of of buy in he needed. And and then also that, as I've said, it was a zombie company. So they were, they were able to make this sort of clean jump from where we're we're an operating company that does business intelligence software into we are a Bitcoin leverage play and, and, and now all of our investors understand that they're not expecting us to be Apple cash flowing. You know that this is a pureplay. So yeah, you're right that you know that a lot of things had to line up. And that's I guess why we it's four years later and we haven't seen many other large public companies do a similar strategy. There's, there's, I think we underestimated at the time how unique Micro Strategy's position was. And, and yeah, now they're like true corporate adoption as like a treasury asset is, is really happening. But that that's on the scale of like 3% rather than 150% like Micro Strategy has done. Yeah, exactly. I, I don't know if you guys remember seeing at at the very beginning of this year, ahead of the ETF launches, when, when people knew that they were going to launch on January 11th, a, a very popular trade was shorting micro strategy. Because the thought was that like they're, they're like the gap between, you know, their, their value in Bitcoin was going to close. Because why would you invest in micro strategy if there's spot Bitcoin ETFs now and the market was entirely proven wrong. Like I think, yeah, yeah, it was an early 2024 where like they just gapped higher, squeezed a bunch of shorts. And I think that is a testament to how successful their strategy is with tapping into bond market investors and volatility investors by just issuing convertible notes like month after month after month. So yeah, I'm curious if you guys have any thoughts on like where they're going in the future. But I don't see micro strategy like going away anytime soon. Yeah, we, we happen to have a Michael Saylor on the podcast earlier this week that'll, that'll be coming out in a few weeks. So, and we, we were quizzing him about I sort of personally as a, as a, as a Bitcoiner, I'm, I just hold Bitcoin and I have FOMO watching what MicroStrategy is doing. And I, I, you know, I'm tempted to, you know, get a micro strategy allocation because what he's effectively doing and, and what they've now oriented their KPIs around is this concept of Bitcoin yield that they are delivering on. And it comes with some risk, but I think it's, it's working. And I think that that risk is, is, is small enough that it's attractive to me as a, as a, as a Bitcoiner and, and someone who would like to grow their stack, right. But so we were quizzing him about this. And, and yeah, that's, that's the strategy. And, you know, they're going to keep leveraging the tools they have at their disposal. We had this conversation a few hours before they announced their latest 875,000,000. So they're just going to keep on doing this so long as capital markets are are inefficient in how they're pricing micro strategy. And also so long as the, the the debt markets don't have any better way to get, you know, exposure to the upside of Bitcoin, right? It's a, it's a hell of an offer to to a debt market of like, I will pay you back. Basically, you know what I borrow from you using my operating company plus 65 bits of of interest, but basically like you're going to get your money back and if there's upside, then you can participate in that upside. What like what a hell of an offer. And I think there's going to be no shortage of, of, of, you know, debt of debt market participants who want more of that into the future. So this is a fun spicy one because I didn't expect we were going to go here, but I'll, I, I think I, I think the micro strategy stuff's cool in the sense of like it's just a fun, you know, you have somebody that can do something different and see how far you can take it. I think it's right where Jesse, I've seen a lot of like folks that are friends that respect like where they have like 4 O1 KS and tax advantage accounts get exposure, which makes sense, although you could take a couple extra steps and get reduced to counterparty risk by doing self-directed. But it's an easy form to go get leverage and individuals won't leverage with micro strategy. Where where I think maybe Jesse and others should just think twice about selling Bitcoin for it is because it's the same reason why individuals don't go invested. I know it's different, but it's kind of the same in like Solana, because you can go get some like higher potential leverage on the crypto market by going to another asset. But you basically have like three to four layers of counterparty risk. And one of them is the mental counterparty risk because now you're paying attention to something instead of just doing what somebody was supposed to do. And then when you exit because you have to exit the trade, right, because you ultimately want Bitcoin. But that's just one layer of counterparty risk. The one that shocks me that nobody talks about. Well, there's actually two. One of them is like, where do they custody this? Because it's all centralized custodians. And if they lose the underlying, your sats per share is actually 0. Nobody says that. And the second one is they're basically poking the bear. And I don't like poking the bear when it's messing with the money because what happens when the bear is like, hey, I think I'm going to need that for whatever reason. I'm not saying that ever could happen, but like that has to go in the equation. And so you layer all of that and then the taxable events on the exit of your position into that and then selling that position back in. And it's like, yeah, I think I'm good and I don't. And I'd say for Jesse, I'm saying in general, like that's how individuals should think about it. Like corporates and that need exposure and they want higher leverage and all of it. But I don't think for like the average bitcoiner, they should be selling their Bitcoin to go get it exposure to like a publicly traded company as their Bitcoin price exposure. Yeah. And ultimately for me that the thing that tips the scale big time is the taxable event of of you know, I, I don't, I unfortunately don't have any Bitcoin in a tax advantage account. Otherwise this would be a lot more tempting. Frankly, I think I would, if I did, I would probably chase that with, with some small percentage like, you know, five, maybe 10%, but limited to that because there is a, there are risks that go with it. I just think that, you know, Solana, Solana has greater risks than it's worth. But I feel, I'm inclined to think that this strategy, that micro micro strategy is deploying is less risky than the yield that they are generating. But that's my personal take. But the thing that stops me from doing it is I, you know, Michael Saylor says don't sell your Bitcoin. He's right. Like it's better to have the underlying thing. If this thing's going to 200X over the next 20 years, as, as Michael Saylor says it, it will, and you know, we also say it will, then, then I don't want to screw that up. That's so let's say it another way. Sam, I'm curious your question 'cause I was going to pose it as like, let's pretend because this is effective. What we're talking about Michael Saylor or micro strategy is Coinbase. So if they do what they do in in in infinite infinitum, like they get to what they want to, then they have 900,000 whatever the number of Bitcoin. Will we talk about Coinbase not holding all this asset because of of this and where it goes. So how confident like Jesse, where would that breakdown where you'd feel concerned? Because we feel concerned with Coinbase having all this Bitcoin for all the reasons that we feel. It's the same thing with micro strategy. And it's just this is BlackRock, right? Yeah, this isn't the fun part about having these discussions and like where I think we found luck in this or cool part of the show is like this is stuff nobody talks about. Like we got crypto Twitter, Bitcoin Twitter, we have everybody stats per share. But it's like wait, let's break this down. Like what is actually happening here? And let's think about like the actual first principle risk of where it is. And there's this notion of the underline and and I think that's another component of this of there's a centralization of an asset happening that historically does you don't want it to centralized. And I think Jesse, where you where this would come in, where would make more sense is a 5A3A55O7 where Fidelity Coinbase bit go river on ramp like all these keys. Now you can actually know this underline and maybe they're all over the world. So when somebody has an issue with it, it's like, well, now you're protected and micro Sailor probably should hold micro strategy as a tech company, they should probably participate in that. Then I think you start to de risk it. But it's pretty wild that like they're just allowed to like leave all this Bitcoin on a central point of failure, which historically hasn't really worked very well for the 1st 15 years in Bitcoin. Does your Bitcoin custody setup keep you up at night? Maybe you still have coins sitting on an exchange worried about hackers. Or maybe you've set up your own self custody but don't feel safe with your Bitcoin savings stashed on a little plastic device in your desk drawer. Gain Peace of Mind with On Ramp and our multi institution custody solution. Here's how it works. On Ramp creates a dedicated multi sig vault just for you. 3 separate institutions each hold a key on ramp bit go and coin cover, but none can move funds unilaterally. Instead, only you have control over your coins with on ramps multi institution custody. You'll sleep better at night knowing your Bitcoin is stored with best in class security on chain with fault tolerant multi sig. If you believe your Bitcoin is going to be worth a lot someday, don't jeopardize that future by exposing your coins to hackers on exchanges, $5 wrench of tax in the real world, or perhaps most importantly, the risk that you might screw something up with a highly technical self custody set up on ramps. 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 on rampbitcoin.com. Yeah, Yeah. No, it's, it's a very fairpoint. And Sam, you brought up the ETFs as well and 90% of those assets are custody with Coinbase too. So that poses a huge risk of centralization and becoming an unsecured creditor of that firm. I'm curious because there was also a little bit of information in the report, I believe about ETFs, right? And there's obviously one big inhibitor to firms purchasing the ETF is if, if you have over 40% of your treasury insecurities, you have to register as an investment company, if I understand that correctly. Are there other considerations you think that firms will think through as it relates to ETF exposure versus spot exposure beyond just investment company versus commodity? Are there other things you think people are are considering? I think there are a lot of reasons why a business should hold spot Bitcoin instead of an ETF, and I think those reasons are pretty straightforward. And I haven't seen a single company buy the ETFs as opposed to spot Bitcoin. I think you know, Yeah, yeah, as you mentioned, there's the Forty Act, which requires a company to hold less than 40% of their assets as securities. That may be one reason why a lot of companies haven't bought a lot of gold on their treasuries in the past, because you you either have to hold GLD and pain management fees on it and potentially be an investment company, or you have to buy gold which is not liquid at all. And so you don't get any of the advantages or like roles of a traditional treasury asset. So Bitcoin can really just play a perfect role with both the liquidity and the price appreciation while serving as a commodity. And so I think I think it's a pretty obvious decision for companies to just buy spot Bitcoin. Maybe the one consideration would be custody because a lot of business owners or or not all that familiar with custody. But yeah, until until I see an example of a company that's buying the the ETFs instead of spot Bitcoin, I'm not all concerned about that. How how do you think about custody for as much as you could share that cohort and the percentages in the reason, one of the reasons I ask is part of the, you know, our firm is, was realizing back when you talk about the five person investment committee, an individual's very easy to make decisions. They can specifically like they can do self custody live on river using ETF. But the second they have to go to a committee that's looking at this anything past like, OK, they're like, well, wait, where's the custodian? And if you tell them you're going to hold it on plastic devices, they're just like, absolutely not. That's where like the ETF kind of comes in because it's like, I'd rather nobody gets fired for buying an ETF there. If they lose the assets. Well, it's at least we did the thing. So I'm curious how you guys have seen that play in because you guys have, you know, world class custody, Alex, just put out, you get your team put out the the reserves stuff where if you want to plug that's that'd be great. But like how you guys think about that and how firms, if it's a if it precludes them for getting exposure or like what I've seen sometimes is when there's material, when it gets to a certain threshold, that's when people start to really get concerned with allocating more because they're like, well, I felt good about this. Now I don't really feel good because I don't really know what the fault tolerance or redundancy is in this. Yeah. Well, I doubt that there will be any disagreement between us when it comes to custody. I think that businesses should always be very concerned about custody and should always be very thoughtful about where they're holding their Bitcoin. You mentioned like no one gets fired for like buying an ETF. I, I don't think anyone in the public company space gets fired for onboarding with Coinbase and that's why eight of the 9 ETF issuers are custoding with Coinbase. The one exception, Fidelity has their in house custody. And I think the same is going to be for a lot of the largest publicly traded companies. I think that most of them are going to go to Coinbase because simply like you're not going to get fired for going to the largest, most regulated custodian. That being said, there are, you know, I, I think there are only 20,000 companies in the US that are over 500 employees. There are 33 million other smaller companies that can take the time to actually think more deeply about like what custody solution makes most sense for them. As As for River, we we've built all our custody in house. So many companies trust us with our own custody solutions in in cold storage. I I'd be happy to speak a little bit about the proof of reserves maybe a little bit later, but we also encourage companies to withdraw to self custody if they have the technical expertise to do so. I think another great solution for for for businesses is some sort of collaborative custody or like multi institutional custody model where they're dividing up that risk because I think you can mitigate both the risks of self custody and just trusting a single third party. And so, yeah, yeah, I think that all businesses at any point should be concerned about it, no matter how large or small their allocation is. Yeah. I think just on that note, what's interesting, it's a good slide to keep up, Jackson, is I think the interesting part where you said, Sam, and like what we feel as individuals is we have too much exposure, maybe just the right amount depending on who you ask on Bitcoin. So you naturally have to think through custody really deeply because it's majority if not all of one's net worth. And if we believe where we're going is this is the best store of value, that's ultimately where businesses store all their value that all these things ultimately hit ahead, right? They have to plan ahead because whether the price appreciation or they're increasing adoption of the asset and divesting from other investment vehicles, it's just something it's like it's a just natural kind of like it hits an inflection point and it kind of almost like it hinders increasing and people don't talk about it. It's almost implicit versus explicit in that they don't buy more because they're just like, oh, I don't feel comfortable. And is it like this is the threshold I'm willing to lose or I'm willing to mess up versus like creating the tools and solutions that let people actually be able to get as much as they want and feel that there's like you reference, you know, multi institution. One of the aspects is like this, this notion of financial controls that exists for wires and any movement of assets at any corporate level. Like that's what we have to figure out from a Bitcoin perspective. And you probably want that with multiple institutions. So then the assets can't move unless there's all of these things that happened in place. And that's where like going back to the MSTR thing, I think would need to be in place for that. Like what happens when it's 3X, right? We're at 180 K and we all know like that's just going to never. I mean, it'll happen. And they're like, what do they do then? And what do the shareholders do that like when you know? Just a bit, yeah. You got to be thinking a cycle or two cycles ahead at all times. Sam, I'm curious, so on this slide right there's about 1/4 of businesses surveyed have concerns about custody and trading. And you mentioned that you provide kind of like an unbiased menu or choice of different custody models, right, self custody, collaborative custody, multi institution, traditional third party custody. I'm curious like to the extent you're able to share or have the insights, how do you, how do you perceive business owners comfortability around self custody? Like do you find a lot of times as it relates to their business that there is discomfort there and they're typically opting to keep their Bitcoin parked with river or is it, you know, is it the other way around? You're finding that most people prefer to have self custody or collaborative custody even for their business assets. Yeah, I, I think for a lot of the smaller and medium sized businesses, the, the thought process is very similar to probably how we, we all approached it as individuals, right. You, you kind of buy Bitcoin first, you have it on an exchange for a little bit, then you Start learning more about self custody and then you eventually start dipping your toes in the water. Anecdotally from the businesses I've spoken with, all of them that that I've spoken with would would like to eventually get to a place where they're very comfortable holding their own assets and self casting their Bitcoin. And they're kind of in the process of getting comfortable with the flows of, you know, putting their excess cash reserves in the Bitcoin. And you know, as that allocation grows in size, then they end up starting to move some off of the river and into self custody. Yeah. No, that's interesting. I mean we all kind of just spoke to it. But the idea that you have to be thinking one or two cycles ahead, right? And I I would almost take the inverse of what you said, not in an argumentative way, but like in the instance that Bitcoin is 100,100 and 2200 thousand 500,000, you know, thinking 5, let's call it about five years down the line. I would be shocked if more people were moving their assets off of river and doing self custody versus leaving it on river or using another third party solution like what we have here at on ramp, Especially now that you guys have the proof of reserves right and you're extremely transparent as a business about how those assets are. I mean, commend you guys for doing that. I think that's fantastic. So I'd almost, I'd almost disagree. I think it's the price increases, there's going to be more and more discomfort and especially if there's, you know, let's call it 5-10 or more stakeholders involved in the business, it becomes challenging, I'd imagine to figure out who actually manages keys. How do you think about succession planning? How do we actually get like technically savvy enough to be managing these within our organization? So it'll certainly be interesting to play out over the next couple of years, I think. The the caveat with that is it's. It's very much sure. The problem is it's part of the founding like of in this business is that 2022 everyone blew up. So you don't know who to trust. So you just see all the assets move out of central exchanges. They don't know like who's a good player, who's the bad player? People don't they just see the right and they leave it for a while and they go into, you know, we just forget. We have short memories in space. And so like a net new wave will come in and they'll be like, it's cool, like all the custodians have all the world class stuff like river, but we know that's not true and we can't help ourselves. And so then they lose assets. And then I think Jackson, it starts that vicious cycle of like, oh, we got to take self custody. And it's like, because custody, it's just the problem that there's a digital bearer asset and you don't know who not to trust. This is a problem with the self custody. So that's like the OP the and I don't think that that moves away. It just consistently every cycle goes and it's kind of where we have this like longer term vision where individuals, if we're right, we'll catch you into it or we'll go in and we're like ahead of it. But it's like this is a logical progression because it's the middle ground between not having to deal with the pain of self custody and holding millions of dollars in your house on a plastic device, but also not having to just singularly rely on the best institution. Because it's almost hard to fully know, especially when people as you know in the business world, like they're literally trying to survive in their core competency to go from a technical perspective and know who the best is. It's almost. It's very hard for them to do so. Yeah, as as much as we do encourage River clients to self custody and just withdraw their coins every month, it's also very encouraging to see like now, now that we have our proof of reserves, you you can see our assets under custody, it's publicly available information. And to see that number grow and grow month after month compared to like, you know, coin bases or some other large crypto exchanges assets under custody decline. It, it's encouraging to see that because I think it's a sign of how much trust is placed in in river. And so, yeah, yeah, we're very much paying attention to that. Yeah, it, it's, it does remind me of the, I mean, we talked about that nobody ever got fired buying IBM and buying IBM right now in terms of custody is trust in Coinbase. And I feel like, you know, there's always a lag between the reputation of a brand and like what they're actually, you know, like what what they've actually built. And and, you know, you see, I think that's a great point that rivers Bitcoin under custody growing over time is it is a sign of trust building for river. And whereas, you know, coins coming off of these larger older exchanges like Coinbase is, is a sign of the inverse. And, and I think it just goes back to like the market in general is still quite naive, naive about what they should consider with regard to custody solutions for Bitcoin. And so you default to reputational brand and, and Coinbase is the big player still in that sense. But but that's really all they they've got going for them. They've got a long track record and and they're the name that people know and they're not investing in in, you know, proof of reserves the way the river is. They're not in investing in an improvement on multi sig that like on ramp is doing with multi institution custody. And I think there there's, it's just a lag function between the market realizing, learning more about what matters and shifting away from IBM and towards, you know, the, the, the newer solutions that have better properties and maybe just our younger brand. And client services, like I would commend, I was, I won't call it the person, but working with River on a investment fund and we're accepting wires and, and some of it was going into to River and like one of the, on the client service side was like sending me texts and helping onboarded. Like you can't get that at a coin base or, or crack it. Like you just get no help and it's a black box. It's always been like that because the market's too reflexive and they have too many clients to have to serve. And they aren't really financial institutions. They're more of like this weird mix between attack in a, in a financial institution and you don't get that. So that's another big thing going for firms that really care about the client experience. Sam, on the, on the note of those like 4 cohorts, and I was kind of surprised to see the, what was the objection? What was the 1st? The main one that was a hindrance. Liquidity. I was thinking through. Accounting. It was accounting. That was everyone. I was kind of surprised. Oh yeah, yeah, that. Like it, it makes sense, but also just curious like, like the regulatory concerns, I feel like is this big backdrop and maybe that's more because we're further in the weeds. But like this election and a lot of that we've anecdotally heard, you know, people are just stay out of the markets or waiting till election because there's just a natural kind of it's turned into an issue from from a political perspective like Bitcoin or crypto in general. Like just what surprised you in those findings or or was there anything that it was a pretty much on par with kind of like the anecdotes you've seen in the market? Well, yeah, I think I think that chart may be slightly misleading in that it it is representative of a survey of businesses across many different industries. And I think the regulatory concerns are very valid for certain businesses that either have money transmitter licenses or they're in the mining space and they think that, you know, they could be discharged from where they're operating. So there are certain specific businesses that should be thinking about regulatory risk very carefully, but for for your mom and pop, you know, restaurant or home builder or construction worker that is just following a simple strategy of buy and hold. Anecdotally, I've not heard regulatory as a a large concern about adding Bitcoin. Yeah, the one. That surprises me on this is the stakeholders to agree like because we all know, you know, it's like the way I think about this is like a family, right? Like if we went to our family and it's our balance sheet, we're like, hey, we should buy some Bitcoin. I guess if you're the patriarch and the person's leading, that's that's what you see come through. And there's probably a lot of people you never see or you get an interest, but they never make it through because if you're the son and try to get the family to buy Bitcoin, it's a hard sell, if that makes sense. Like that certain businesses never get to see you guys because it's not the right setup for there's no shorter people that probably have somebody part of their firm that wants Bitcoin, but everyone else is like, this is not the thing we're going to do. Yeah, yeah. Often times it's a family run, you know multi generational business where the son or the grandson is trying to orange pill their their parents and it takes sometimes years to to drive it to completion. What about on this chart, Sam, with accounting and tax treatment as it relates to public companies Like what are your thoughts going into 2025? Well, yeah. So, so the Fast B is the organization that establishes gap accounting, which is the accounting standards that every company follows in the US. And last December they put out guidance that updated how Bitcoin is accounted for on financial statements, which makes it a lot more favorable for especially a public company to hold because you're, you're no longer going to get punished by having to account for Bitcoin at at its lowest observable value in, in like since you bought it basically. So it was very punitive for a while. And then they put out this statement in, in December that is officially going into effect this December, I believe. But companies may choose to implement it at any point before then. And so you've had companies like Block already implement these new standards. And so I think, I think that with this new, you know, standard set, it'll make it a lot easier for businesses to be able to actually pull the trigger on making a Bitcoin investment and not having to worry about like how investors are going are going to, you know, complain about net earnings being lower than they otherwise should be. Yeah. It feels like a massive roadblock that's been lifted. But at the same time, I'm almost skeptical now of the degree of which public companies will adopt Bitcoin only because of what we kind of talked about earlier as it relates to micro strategy, right? And like in 2020, everyone on Bitcoin Twitter was just talking about how this would just be the first of many companies to kind of deploy the strategy. And I agree with you, Sam, and kind of what's been discussed today that they're uniquely suited. And we probably won't see many other companies beyond what we've seen already deploy that strategy. But actually thinking about now just making an allocation within public companies as a treasury asset, right? Like maybe 1125 percent. Do you actually think that we're on the precipice now with these accounting changes, that we'll see a surge in demand next year? Or do you think that maybe it could play out being a little bit more tepid than some, you know, some commentators are making out to be? Yeah, I think you might see some marginal growth in the number of public companies that are adding Bitcoin to their balance sheet. But I think the primary drivers of business Bitcoin adoption will continue to be from private and smaller companies. You know, they're the ones that don't have to be worrying about next quarter's earnings. They don't have to, you know, get 100 people to sign off on a Bitcoin investment. All those concerns will will, will still be there for public companies. And so, you know, it would be very encouraging to see some more public companies invest in Bitcoin. I mean, we've seen 40% growth in the number of public companies that have a Bitcoin strategy in the past year, but that number is still quite small. I believe it's less than 60 public companies worldwide. And so you know, we'll, we'll probably still be below 2 or 300 in a few years if we just follow that follow that growth, whereas I think you'll, you'll continue to see a lot more growth from, from smaller businesses. Yeah, I think that's that's dead right. I I do think that the one aspect of the fasby change that people are under estimating the impact of is that companies with significant Bitcoin holdings, their quarterly earnings calls, those CF OS and CE OS are going to start looking like rock stars quarter after quarter after quarter. And to date, it's been punitive and you've looked like a loser because you've had to mark down to the lowest point that Bitcoin got to during the quarter and then take the the hit every single quarter, no matter what, you know, the actual value of of your coins got is now. And and that's going to switch to companies, C suites that have Bitcoin as part of their treasury looking like geniuses or just like, you know, being able to advertise like, yeah, we, we, we, yeah, we had a operating, operating income of 100 million this quarter, but we also had a $1 billion gain in our Bitcoin holding. So we made $1.1 billion this quarter. Look how much better we are this year versus a few years ago. Like that's going to start happening. And that's going to, it's going to, it's going to be kind of stark between companies that don't have that tailwind on their, on their earnings calls and those that do. And I think that's going to just seep into the psychology of C suites of like, well, you know, I'm, I'm jealous, plus I'm envious of these companies that get that tailwind. So maybe we we should take a more serious look at, you know, adopting that as part of our strategy too. Yeah, I mean, same on that note, like I was thinking through what Jesse was referencing and part of what probably seems like it's hard adoption for institutions or, or specifically publicly traded companies. Is this multifaceted, not only in the understanding of Bitcoin, but getting the groups internally to to buy in. But then ultimately where do you park it? Because it has a liquidity profile of a, of a treasury, like we're talking about treasuries and as a liquidity profile of cash equivalents. But they can't actually treat it like that because of the volatility. So they have to look at it as a longer term player. That doesn't make any sense to allocate. They're not coming for six months as like a money market fund. It's like a, you know, 2-4 year, whatever the duration. And so then they have to naturally like manage that internally. And that seems like a very complex thing to get by and especially at a significant amount. How do you think about that? And do you think that like is hindered some of this because it's not that many companies like thinking in that way as well. And then why wouldn't you just do stock buybacks and do other things with your capital? And then that's where goods you start damaging or getting punished for allocating to it as well. Yeah, well, I do. I do think it makes sense for most companies, both public and private, to hold on to a lot of excess cash because those that do are going to be able to withstand, you know, cyclical downturns a lot better because they're not going to have to dilute their shareholders every time they need to raise money. And so I think, I think this whole thing is going to require just a rethinking of treasury management generally, because to your point, Bitcoin doesn't fit into any existing sleeve of a treasury. Like if you if you look at Apple's balance sheet, they you know, all of its low duration, all of its fixed income. And so there's not really a place that could easily that you could easily say, Oh yeah, like I'm going to swap this out for Bitcoin and it's going to serve the same purpose. And so, yeah, yeah, I think it's going to take a long time for for CF OS to come around to just rethinking their approach to treasury management with a longer term time horizon. Would you? Would you agree? Yeah, it's just a hard thing. I mean, we, we see it on the institutional side, right, Like pensions and institutions in generals, like what what bucket falls in? We had a, we have an advisor, he had his firm bought by Blackstone and he, he was a hedge fund and he said that he had the same problem 20-30 years ago. They said well, bucket and he and they were doing like crazy returns. He's like, I don't care what bucket you put it in, just you, you figure that out. That's your job. When you would talk to institutional investors, obviously we can't say that, but it reminds you of something like this. It's like, do you want the best performing asset of all time or not? You figure out the bucket, Sam, Sam, I know we're running up on time. I'm curious like you had three head notes on three interesting parts of like future adoption with Bitcoin, so it's cross-border wages and commerce. Curious where you see the anecdotes from the interest and also what's because I think that's a different angle and flavor of adoption is people don't want to come at it from money, they want to come at it from operational efficiencies and then that's the Trojan horse into coming into it as a store of value. And curious like any if what you saw there. Well, a a report on business Bitcoin adoption would not be comprehensive if we only focused on Bitcoin as a treasury asset, because for many companies and nonprofits, they're they're using it very much so as a payments mechanism. And so, you know, we, we really wanted to be inclusive of bitcoins payments use case. Of course, it's not nearly, you know, adopted at the level of of Bitcoin as a treasury asset. And frankly I don't anticipate it to to be adopted at the same rate. But we wanted to highlight a few specific like niche use cases where some businesses are getting a tremendous amount of value from using Bitcoin. A few of the of the case studies we have in the report focus on some of these companies that are that are using Bitcoin for payments. So just as a few examples, like if you're a nonprofit that is paying out, you know, wages across borders or you're settling, you know, cross-border contracts, for a lot of them, it makes sense to paying Bitcoin as opposed to dealing with the local currency. Alex Gladstein from HRF has spoken about this Like they, they, they settle their contracts in Bitcoin out of convenience, not because they're big corners, but because it helps them reduce jurisdictional and like political risk of a government in this, in, you know, Kenya or whatever, not wanting a certain business or group to get funded by HRF. And so for them, it makes a lot of sense for, you know, another nonprofit like Students for Liberty, most of their or sorry, I think it's 40% of their employees worldwide prefer to get paid at least a little bit in Bitcoin because a lot of those employees are based in Turkey or Argentina. And so they're, they're, they're dealing with a very different environment than we are in the USA. Final use case that I want to highlight is just the amount of demand from the Bitcoin community that I think business owners can like extract a tremendous amount of value by like being very supportive of the Bitcoin community. So P&E Lane is a vineyard in Colorado run by Ben Justman and Adams is a shoe company based in New York. And they have both very successfully tapped into just the, the demand from Bitcoiners that, you know, maybe they don't love selling Bitcoin all the time, but if there's a company that you can buy shoes from in Bitcoin, then like they're going to be supported. And one of the stats that Adams shared with me is that their, their average order size that's paid in Bitcoin is more than double their, their average order size that's paid in dollars. And I think that just speaks to like the, the quality of a of a Bitcoiner client. And so I don't see that being like a widespread thing where every business is going to start catering to bit corners. But if you are a small business owner and like you're trying to bootstrap your growth, I think that is a great strategy. One other one that you didn't mention, I think it was kind of in there and it's, we feel it and I think a lot of Bitcoin businesses feel it as like as people grow to appreciate Bitcoin, individuals, they naturally own businesses and their businesses, they want to accept Bitcoin because if they don't, they have to sweep the cash into Bitcoin and they get fees on that. There's just some price. And so and then if you take the dollars, you have interchange fees and you're paying 3%. And this is something that we're like actively working on. Well, you want to offer the convenience of the dollar system, but there's the inconvenience of the fees associated and where you can have a reduction in price by paying in Bitcoin. And I think that's an also growing trend that we'll see more as individuals want more Bitcoin accumulate. You'll make it easier for individuals to pay in Bitcoin, which is a nice like feedback loop for individuals that maybe you've never heard of it, that you go and you have your cash app already, you can just instantly swap and get your 5% off and everybody kind of wins. I think it's an interesting use case as well. Totally. Well, Sam, appreciate you being generous with your time. Is there anything else on the reserve side for River that you wanted to cover or do you feel like we're in a good place in terms of what we covered already? Yeah. Well, I, I guess briefly just to mention that the, the headline yesterday on on Wednesday, we finally released our proof of reserves. So if if anyone wants to read more about that, you can go to our Rivers blog. And we're going to be putting out a monthly attestation of both our assets and our liabilities. And it's something we've been working on for a long time. I think it's a great step forward for the industry and I think, you know, hopefully it'll become the industry standard at least for at least for Bitcoin focus companies. Maybe, maybe the coin basis of the world won't be too quick to follow. But yeah, please check that out. I thought the proof of liabilities part was really clever and and as far as I know the first of its kind. Did you guys get that model from any other precedent or did you come up with the proof of liabilities concept there? Yeah, I, I believe there are a few other companies that have Twitter around with providing a similar sort of proof of liabilities. Bitmex is one they, they have a blog post on like how that works to to briefly explain the way. So proof of liabilities is a lot more difficult than a proof of assets for a proof of reserves because with the proof of assets, it's as simple as just posting your addresses and then having some sort of predefined transaction formula to like prove that you were the owner of those assets. With the proof of liabilities, it's a lot more difficult because you somehow have to prove that you, you know that, that, that you are not hiding any users, you know, balances from your liabilities while also maintaining their privacy. And so the way the way we do it and the way I believe Bitmex does it is by publishing a Merkel sum tree of all of our account balances and then sharing the the root hashes with our clients so that they can go on our website and pretty easily just find their account balance within the sum of our liabilities. And so the way the way the user could find out if we're gaming the system is by simply verifying the reserves. And if the reserves aren't there, then they would know that rivers excluding their reserves from the proof of liabilities. And so this this concept almost requires a certain level of participation from our clients because the more clients that prove their liabilities, the more likely it is that their funds are safe. But without without being audited on a monthly basis, which I think no one does, This is the best method for just providing an attestation of your of your. Liabilities, yeah, just to share some, you probably appreciate. So we have an investment fund that we have institutional allocators and it's kind of like a private placement ETF. And one of the things we've done and they're very sophisticated, like pensions have asked for segregated wallets, right? And generally a firm wouldn't do that. And from a liability perspective, it still sits under as a pull vehicle. But from an audit perspective, you can always know that your funds are there. And if everyone sets up, then eventually it's that alarm bell effectively, which is important that funds are moving, then they shouldn't be moving. So we've always liked that. And then like the multi institution naturally is a, is a, is like a proof of reserve built in because of the segregated account. But yeah, the, the more that we can provide transparency as an industry where it's generally opaque, it doesn't fix everything, but it gives better foresight into when things aren't working very well versus like remember grayscale to like trust us, it's at it's at Coinbase and then BlackRock trusts us, it's at Coinbase. You know, like, well that that didn't work out so good at 2022. So maybe we need a little bit of audit. So it's, it's awesome to see that you guys are focused there and really great to have, you know, see you guys doing that. Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, it's a great president to be set. And I also think it's timely as well, just ahead of the bull market really picking up steam where I know River would never do it. But I know a lot of other companies have gotten themselves into some shenanigans as Bitcoin begins to RIP. And this is just like a nice additional layer of transparency to give your clients. And I'm sure you'll get the participation that you need on the liability side. There's no shortage of Bitcoiners who will want to test that out. And I'll try it out myself. But Sam, anyways, I know we're running up on time here. Thank you again for joining us. Want to give you a hand off. I'm not sure if you're going to mention it, but I did notice you're a published author. So that's pretty cool. But anything you want to share with the audience before we end the call here? Well, first of all, thank you for having me on. This was a lot of fun. You can follow me on Twitter at Macromule I I mainly post about Bitcoin and reports that we put out. And yeah, I did published a book over the past year on the history of money more targeted towards I would say like family members and no corners that you know, are just dipping their toes in the water. So maybe not recommended material for for most the listeners on this, but yeah, yeah, I appreciate pointing that out. Awesome. Well, thanks, Sam. Really good to have you joined today. Appreciate your time. Sam, 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. 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