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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 that business, 1974198792972000 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. Everyone, welcome back to the last trade. This week we have Richard Byworth and I'm joined by my Co host Michael Tanguma and we have Brian Cabela's this week standing in for Jesse. So Richard, how are you doing? Great to see you. Yeah, very good. Thanks, Jackson. Great to be here with you guys. Appreciate it. So, Richard, really excited for this one. I know sees Capital, you guys are doing a lot in the alternative space primarily focused on alternative investments. And I know you would categorize yourself as a Bitcoiner. So really excited to hear more about your traditional finance background and then talk a lot more about your journey into Bitcoin, how you think about it as an allocator, among many other things, getting a pulse on Switzerland in the European market. So maybe the best place to start, Richard, would just be to get a better sense of your background in traditional finance. I know you've worked in many different capacities for maybe two decades or so, plus or minus. So we'd love to just hear more about your path and ultimately what led you here today. Sure. Well, look, thanks and always, always good to connect with fellow Bitcoiners. And so, yeah, looking forward to this chat. So look, to give you a quick understanding of where I came from, I was an investment banker for pretty much the first, I think 18 years of my career. I worked in London as a trader. I was trading convertible bonds predominately for Japanese underlyings. So you think about MicroStrategy and what they've been using for their capital structuring, they're generally using convertible bonds. That's the most efficient product. That's what I was trading from 2000 basically through to 2005 six. I moved to Tokyo at the beginning of 2005, so I was working for Nomura, the Japanese investment bank. I moved to Tokyo at the beginning of O5, did five years there. Tail end of that was obviously Lehman. You'll end up, don't know if you're aware, but Lehman Brothers got bought by two banks essentially. So Barclays bought the US operations and Nomura bought the European and Asian operations. So we ended up merging the most cowboy bank on Wall Street with the most aggressive bank in Japan. And you can imagine the cultural shocks were were fairly violent. So it was it was fun. And I definitely think I could probably write a book about that, that whole experience. But then, you know, interest rates went to zero. I think everyone in banking started to realize that we were going to have a major problem with, you know, inflation at some point. And so I, I bought gold in 2012 after dismissing Bitcoin from the junior kid on my desk. He was talking about it in 2009 in Tokyo. So I was like, can you just stop talking about scams on the Internet and sell derivatives to your clients, please? And so, yeah, we, I started buying gold in 2012 just as a hedge, just as a way to just protect against what was for me at that point, an inevitability of the failure of, of, of Fiat currencies. And then in 2017, I, I was getting to the point where I wanted to leave banking for good. I was completely done with it mentally. And I was reading this book called Sapiens by Yuval Harari. And I agreed with a lot of what he was talking about with the future and models for society and humanity, etcetera. But he kept bringing out this Bitcoin thing, which I remembered as a scam from my kid on the desk in 2009. And I was like, why is he talking about this? Like, so I figured I'd probably better find out what it was and started reading about it middle of sort of 2017, which you'll remember was, was a fairly frothy period. So I was like, OK, I'm just going to buy some of this thing. So I turned to my grand on the desk at the time and just being completely tech non savvy and I was like, Herman, can you just, can you just buy everyone on the desk a Bitcoin? It was trading at $1000 at the time. And I then went away for summer and I took a bit of a sabbatical and I came back and Bitcoin had tripled. I was like, Herman, did you buy everyone that Bitcoin? And he's like, I thought you were joking. I was like, screw this. I was like, OK, fine, I need to do this myself. I need to work it out. So at that point I started working out, made the usual error that a lot of people made. I was like, Oh well this Litecoin thing is really cheap. I could buy like 20 of these. So I bought some Litecoin. It went up 5X in the period of five weeks. And I was like, OK, what the hell is going on here? So then I started investing in the space and I invested a mining company, which coincided with me leaving the bank. I was going to join a private equity company, and the mining company founder that I'd invested in said, hey, if you've left the bank, would you come and help me build this business? I was like, how am I going to build a mining business? I'm a finance guy. Like, he's like, no, no, no. He's like, people are running around. I was in Hong Kong at the time. People are running around Hong Kong with suitcases full of cash. They've got no idea what regulation means in this space. If we build a regulated player, you know, we could be very differentiated and attract what will eventually be institutional flow. I was like, OK, that's a good story. So we, we started building this firm, it was called Digenex. The firm expanded very rapidly and we ended up listing the company on NASDAQ through a SPAC in 2020, at which point flows were getting difficult and we were competing with FTX and Binance, who could onboard people in 3 minutes. We'd take three weeks to onboard people. So it was, it was a very painful experience. So we were struggling a bit. And so we were looking for an acquirer and then my chairman found Binance as the acquirer and I was like, I'm not getting in bed with those guys. So I stepped down and I was sitting on the beach in 2022 when Mark sees the son of the family, sees capital. Obviously the namesake called me and said, would you come and run my hedge fund business? And I was like, well, yeah, but I'd want to keep my hand in with crypto. I think there's some very interesting alpha in in hedge funds using crypto as the arbitrage mechanism. And yeah, that then progressed to where we are today. We're obviously very involved in the Bitcoin space here in Switzerland. I I got involved with Relay. I don't know if you know those guys, the dollar cost averaging platform here in Switzerland, which is probably the biggest in Europe. And in fact, maybe given the swan situation, it's probably the biggest in the world now. But yeah, fantastic guys. So I sit on the board of that company very close to them. And so, yeah, that's my sort of Bitcoin focus. That's that's an awesome story. Yeah, it's an incredible. Story You went from the cowboy from one set of Cowboys to the the another set of Cowboys in the Wild West. You've been from from. 18 to 23 you've definitely seen some it's also. Interesting to me that you, you sort of stepped into the mining space initially because at least for me, when I was, so I started sort of understanding Bitcoin roughly the same time for him, late 17, early 18. And it wasn't until I started really digging into the mining side of things that I started to understand why Bitcoin was fundamentally different than everything else through proof of work and all these other mechanisms. And so it's very curious that you, you were sort of still in the your altcoin phase, but then you you latched on to mining as something that felt maybe like real and tangible perhaps. Yeah, it's a very interesting comment. And actually we were GPU mining. So we weren't ASIC mining. So we were GPU mining. And if you remember, Ethereum was still proof of work back then. So we were actually mining Ethereum. It was, it was the most profitable to be mining. But but to your point, I didn't, I didn't understand Bitcoin when I started at the company. I ended up becoming the CEO of a crypto company at about the same time that I became a Bitcoin maxi. So I'm sitting there just completely misaligned value prospect in terms of what we were building. And I remember the exchange guys going, hey, Rich, you know, we want you to join the listing committee because we want to add XRP to the exchange. I was like, no, never shit coin. And by the way, we have to delist everything else and we should be predominantly focused on Bitcoin and just doing Bitcoin derivatives. And so yeah, it it became a bit of a problem with the with running the company. 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. What was it ultimately rich that led you to the more Bitcoin purest or maximalist position? I don't know if you touched on that in the story, but to Brian's point, it's like you, you had your 5X on Litecoin, you had I believe it was perman on the desk, didn't buy you the Bitcoin and then you transitioned into the mining space. You're doing some mining dimension of Etherium and some other coins. Where in that story did you really go down the rabbit hole and Bitcoin and start to fundamentally understand the difference there? You're going to laugh, but for a long time I didn't know that Bitcoin was limited to 21 million. And when I understood that, I was like, OK, normal question was, well, how can we be sure that it's not going to be more than 21 million? How, how can we be sure that that won't get increased? And as I mentioned in 2012, I'd become mentally, I'd become a hard money guy. I'd started buying gold. I was just like, this is the only way we can escape this Fiat disaster that is impending for sure. And yeah, when I understood that Bitcoin was 21 million, I think I started listening to a lot of Bitcoin focused podcasts. And I listened to the Pomp podcast with Murad where he was talking about Bitcoin. And it was October 2018. And I remember I listened to it just before going to bed and I woke up that morning and I was like, I need to buy Bitcoin. I need to buy a lot of Bitcoin. And so I went out and bought it at 6000 and then it immediately halved to 3000. And when then I, I was like, OK, no, this is an opportunity. And just kept going. So it was good. But yeah, that that was my moment, yeah. I've never heard anybody else recently bring it up for years because that's an old school pod that single handedly might be the best podcast that's ever been done about Bitcoin in 60 to 75 minutes. Yeah, it's. Absolutely. Very strong. And it's very prescient, like everything has like literally happened to AT that was described in that podcast from like the market structure forming to the adoption cycles. And the unit bias is a funny thing that you reference because I think that's most people in 17. You get in and then you just buy all this other crap. And similar to you, you look at it, you're like, well, this all can't be valuable. Like what? What's actually happening here? And you quickly find out, OK, there's some value here, but it's not everything. Exactly. I think the unit bias was another thing that progressed me further down the road. It's like when you get to the point of thinking of everything in Bitcoin, like, you know, when you're in banking, you're kind of a slave to this ridiculous salary that you've got. You can never leave. You're locked up in stock, right? As a managing director in a bank, you've got a shit ton of stock. You if you leave, you lose the stock, right? You have to get fired to be able to hold onto your stock, which is a fairly ridiculous incentive structure. But but that, that's how it is. And so you're, you're kind of a slave to this system. And when you, you know, I mean, I remember when I was back in 2015, I would have a spreadsheet with my U.S. dollar value of everything. And you sort of, you got your investments and you're working out. You'd open your spreadsheet every day. Like how am I doing today? But when that denomination moves from dollars to Bitcoin, everything changes. Everything just gets much more simple. And you know, we, we do an annual summit here for investors in, in Zurich. And I had Jeff Booth at the summit this year and I was sat with Jeff at a table while we we had a panel on asset allocation. So, but you know, but you had this group of experts, Titans of the traditional financial industry going, you know, I think this year, you know, private equity, we probably want to see another 5% allocation probably, you know, be dropping private credit a little bit because that's become a little bit overheated. And we sat there and were like, you know, it's just so easy, so simple just to be a Bitcoiner. You know, it just makes life so much easier. You're not messing around with just most of this nonsense. And it is nonsense, right, because it's all dollar denominated at the end of the day. So, you know, you're just, like, scrambling up the hill trying to beat that debasement rate. Yeah. Richard, it's a great point. I have a question on that just because you were brought in I think you said in 2022 to lead the hedge fund business at SEAS. So are you still doing that type of work at the company? And then how do you, how do you balance your investment philosophy or savings philosophy personally, focus predominantly on Bitcoin with having to also be able to speak the language and be knowledgeable about all these alternative investment strategies like how do you manage that personally? Well, look, I mean, I, I traded against hedge funds and sold to hedge funds for my entire financial career. So I know the product very, very well. So I can speak about it. And like, you know, being a bitcoiner as you all are, I'm sure you've had the same experience. There are some people that are just not ready to go on the journey, right? And so, you know, when you're talking to a guy, he's a billionaire and he's looking to allocate capital and he's looking to put 10% of his money into hedge funds. You know, you can say, look, maybe you could think about some of the alpha prospects that are available in this different asset class and start to move him down the track towards that. But you know, I mean, I had a meeting this morning with a guy who's who's starting off with 20 million allocated to hedge funds and he was like, don't ever talk to me about crypto. I don't want to hear it. Super smart guy, double PhD like, but it's just not going to happen. So, you know, you have to understand that some people are ready and some people are not. And you know, I think this is this is what I'm trying to do here. You know, when I do the summit, the investor summit, every year I have a, a Bitcoin. I come and speak at the summit. This year, obviously we had Jeff Booth last year we had Dan Tapiero and Scaramucci, which was fun and then we had Willy Woo the year before that. So just gentle education of these more traditional mindset investors because you you can't just, you know, throw everything at them all at once. I mean, it's a, it's a big journey. I mean, we've all been on a you, you guys mentioned 2018. I'm sort of a 2018 vintage bitcoiner as well. It's it's taken a long time to get to this point, right? So yeah, you can't expect these guys to get there all at once. It's incredibly exciting to have someone like yourself with your background involved because it's, it's like a cheat code when you have professional experience in a different domain and you come in because you can understand the the frame of reference so you don't hit them over the head with the hammer. Because historically in bitcoins first call it 10 to 15 years. It's the have fun staying poor. It's just pushing people actually away from the asset, even though we just historically didn't recognize it as such. And we see this in the West specifically. Or like with the registered investment advisor groups, you can have the resident bitcoiner, the resident, you know, even rationalist that understands this stuff and it's all in. But then it's very hard for them to put their investment advisors or gives any kind of acknowledgement of like, Hey, maybe you want 123 percent because of this historical stigma that comes with crypto or Bitcoin. And so it's a very, you have to be very convicted to be able to like even start to have that conversation, which requires tact and and discretion that I think is required from somebody that understands that cohort. You can't come from outside and you're like, you need Bitcoin because you don't know what their pain points are and what they're like incentive models are. So it's a really exciting next, I think decade we're going to see because this 18 to 23 vintage is really brought in professionals that I don't think historically we're in the space. Yeah. And Michael, to that point, I'd say it spot on. Yeah, I was going to say, oh, good, Rich, to Michael's point as well, it's, it's interesting because there's a you have to be able to effectively communicate to people and speak their language, right. So one of the challenges as it relates to Bitcoin in an asset allocation framework is that Bitcoin, you can make the case of Bitcoin as its own asset class. But if you go back to folks who are allocated to public equities and private equity, you know, real assets, venture, whatever it may be, you, you get stuck in this conversation where you're trying to fit this new asset class of Bitcoin into an existing bucket. And we've done some work around that, right? And trying to figure out and it it'll depend on the investor in their framework and how they're approaching it. They may say Bitcoin is more akin to a real asset because they see value or properties that exist within gold, right, in terms of scarcity. But you can also make the case that Bitcoin has like more of a venture feeling, not in the same way that we'd say that, you know, cryptocurrency is venture capital, but in the sense that Bitcoin as a protocol is following. An exponential adoption rate, which we do see with other tech plays, right? So I'm curious, Rich, like when you, you mentioned earlier communicating the alpha prospects of Bitcoin to some of these traditional allocators. Do you typically try to fit Bitcoin into one of these buckets to speak their language? Or do you really just make the case that Bitcoin is a stand alone asset class and does that resonate with the folks that you're speaking with? Yeah, it's a really good question. It's something that I've sort of changed tack on a little bit recently. And I think the the problem is all of us are capable of sitting down at a dinner and convincing someone they need to buy Bitcoin. You know, you can talk about price, you can talk about exponential exponentiality, you can talk about adoption of the Internet, you can talk about digital gold, all of these things. But the problem is that it always comes down to the same problem. And I had this exact example with a friend of mine recently. We sat down to dinner. He'd just sold his business and he'd, you know, he made several million. And he was like, hey, Rich, you know, we hadn't seen him for a few. I hadn't seen him for a few years. And he's like, hey, Rich, should I put all my money in Bitcoin? You know, is a, is a joke, is a good fool joke. I'm like, OK, yeah. But by the end of the dinner, by the way, you're going to say, yeah, I want to put all my money in Bitcoin. And he did. And at the end of the dinner, he was like, OK, so yeah, no, I need to like, what should I do? I was like, look, first of all, you can't put all your money in Bitcoin because if you do, when it goes down 50%, your wife is going to call me and she's going to go rich. You're an asshole, right? And what it needs for you is to go on this journey. You need to understand why I'm so convicted, so convicted that you are now completely convicted, even though when you go and buy it and see it drop 50%, you go, what the fuck was I doing listening to rich? Sorry, excuse my language, but yeah, I mean, this is this is the problem. If you get people excited about the potential for price appreciation, because we do all know where it's going and we can all be very convincing about that, then they're going to buy it and they're going to sell it at the wrong time. So what I try to do now and this this also works well with that very I know everything kind of person, which are much harder to orange pill. You know, these are the guys, you can't tell them anything. They know everything about everything, right? Of course, Bitcoin is just some idiot project that you're involved with. So with them, this also works well. So the way that I present it is, look, you spend your whole life working for, you know, that moment where you're able to walk away and go, I'm free, I've made enough money and, and I can retire and I can go and live on the island or do whatever it is that I want to do. So you have a vote right here, right now, you have a single vote and you can make that decision, right? You can vote to store the time and energy of your labour in a system that can constantly be debased without your control by the control of a bunch of old guys sitting in a room deciding, you know, what they're going to do with monetary policy. And debasement rate is normally around somewhere between 10 and 15% in recent years. Or you can put your time and and energy into a system where that cannot be debased, that is purely algorithmic, is controlled by no one, and is 100% finite. And you know what everybody says when you say this to them? Yeah, of course. But and you're like, of course, but what? Like that is the vote that you have right here right now. But the challenge is understanding what I've told you about that second system. It's understanding that everything I've just told you is true about that second system. Because the answer is of course, if you just understand that what I've told you is correct, then the answer is of course. And that's been very effective with people lately. Yeah, I, I really like that, that framing, I guess 11 thought on that and I'm sure you've experienced this as well. I started my career in traditional finance space. And and like you were saying, like there's a lot of those people who are very, very smart, intelligent folks in their own right. But I think that leads them down this path of hubris to the extent where even if you make that argument that you just laid out, they won't believe that second system because in their minds, well, one, they just haven't done enough research as you. So it seems too good to be true, right? Like on paper, if the second system existed, to your point, obviously you would store your time and energy in that system. But there's that hurdle of really, I think it's just like ego and hubris for a lot of these folks. And, and at this point of the, the, the sort of trajectory of this thing, we're 15 years in. Those folks have seen multiple cycles, right? Like they hurt. They must have heard about Bitcoin within the past five to 10 years at least once or twice, right? So they've seen these cycles play out and now they have an inherent bias because they didn't act on it prior, right? They, they didn't do the more they didn't do incremental research last cycle or the cycle before. So now when someone tells them like, hey, maybe you should consider this, it does take a massive amount of, you know, killing their own ego to some extent and admitting maybe they were wrong in the past. And I think that's particularly hard for a lot of folks in the traditional finance space because they have made, you know, very successful careers in their own right and, and done amazing things. So it's it's particularly hard for those folks. And then the other, the other piece, which you mentioned earlier, which I like, and I think, you know, maybe as Bitcoiners, we just need to do a better job of, of doing like public service announcements that there are only 21 million. Because that's, that's something I hear a lot too, is if, if you haven't done any work and you've only heard of Bitcoin, there's a good chance you actually don't know that there's only 21 million. And then the other component is also the unit bias. It's like those two things. If we could just try to eliminate those, that would get past a lot of hurdles for folks. Yeah, the unit bias is a problem, people. We'll always say, well, I was, I was in a very senior guy runs a asset management company, billions and billions of dollars. And he was like, so how much is 1 Bitcoin? And we got to the point in the conversation, he was like, OK, I'm thinking about buying, you know, one for each of my kids. How much is 1 Bitcoin? And my, at the time it was $70,000 and he's like $70,000. He's like, I'm way too late, I've missed it, right? And and that's the problem, yeah, it's the unit price. And so that's what's fascinating. I think we're at an inflection point because Jackson brought it up and this comes across, I think anyone that's having conversations with a traditional financial crowd or traditional finance crowd of where does it sit, what bucket, How do I think about it? And I think a component of all of this is in any cell is you're competing with the status quo. So what are people used to doing and how do you get them to move? And if you're looking at Bitcoin, you're like, maybe there's some room to go or run, but it's like at best 123 percent, it's it's magic Internet money S why do I care? Like I'm willing to miss out. But yesterday with what BlackRock and Larry Fink came out with that it's like, I don't know the exact quote, but it's referencing mortgage, the mortgage market and anywhere between 10 to 50 trillion, whatever the the like cap, he's saying it's his standalone asset. That's something we've started a coalesce around here at on ramp when we talk with whether it's pensions or just in any institutional allocator and referencing. Let's segment Bitcoin from crypto and then let's segment that. This is its own bucket, as you would think about in a traditional like 6040. This is its own asset class by itself. Because once you start looking at like that, it's like, well, how much room can it move? And so once that narrative starts to grow, coupled with I'm convinced that the six figure mark, that 100K is really what gets like friends like yours that looked at it at 70 K. And it's like, oh, it's too gone, too far gone. Because at 100K you're like, wait, where, where does this train stop? Is it does it stop at 10, like a million, 10 million? But right now the psychological barrier IS70K maybe goes to 0. But at 100K, it's like, what would cause this to go back to zero? And then now you start looking at on the in the other direction. Yeah, I definitely agree. I think, I think the problem for a lot of people is that unit bias. I think that I wasn't exactly sure what Larry said. Did he basically say that it is going to take a chunk of the mortgage market? I think he said Bitcoin could grow to be as large as the US housing market, if I'm not mistaken, which was about a $50 trillion number. Yeah, I'll find, I'll find it. And you know, he said this after because his bags are packed and that's why we're sitting like at 60 seven, $68,000 because he's like, all right, it's it's it's go time. I'll find the tweet and I'll pull. I'll pull it up. Yeah, no, I, I saw the headline pop up. I just don't recall. I, I didn't read it, but yeah, yeah, BlackRock coming into the scene has been significant for a lot of our investors. You know, this, I remember, you know, going and meeting with investors and, you know, you get introduced as the Bitcoin guy and they're like, Oh yeah, Jamie Dimon says it's a scam or Christine Lagarde says it's a scam. And now when they see one of these folks, IE Larry Fink saying no, no, this, this is legit. This is an asset you need in your portfolio. This is now changing conversations quite significantly. So Larry's arrival is is very, very helpful for the institutional Orange building. Absolutely. Yeah, No, that's that's a great point because this time last year it was still uncertain that if the USETFS would be approved. I think we were kind of nearing certainty just based on how that court decision went, I believe in August. But it certainly has helped from our conversations with the traditional allocators, thinking family offices, registered investment advisors, institutional allocators. When we were reaching out to those folks in summer of 2023, a lot of them were kind of like get lost, right, because the Bitcoin price is $25,000. There was no, there was really no expectation that there would be ETFs approved in 2024. But now the conversation has changed materially. And one thing that we plug into a little bit is the 13 F filings and just taking a look to see under the hood who actually owns these financial products. And there's, you know, as we all know, there's pensions involved in the asset class, there's a lot of registered investment advisors that, you know, they prioritize their fiduciary duties. So the 13 F filings, right, it allows us to take a peek under the hood and see what type of investors own the Bitcoin ETFs. And we have pension funds that have shown up this year, right, very large ones in the United States that are only just dipping their toes in with A10 basis point allocation. But that's, you know, much larger than zero. I think in terms of nominal value, it's 160 or $180 million investment. Now there's a couple of pensions involved and then there's the registered investment advisors that are fiduciaries for their clients. So they're either recognizing that there is a big value proposition in allocating the Bitcoin further clients as an uncorrelated asset that, you know, an emerging asset class, or that means also that their clients are reaching out to them directly and asking for Bitcoin exposure. So I just wanted to touch on the point that you made that having the CEO of the world's largest asset manager being now an advocate for Bitcoin and having a product and having skin in the game, right, and having an incentive for Bitcoin to be adopted by his business and his clients is a huge tailwind that really hasn't has only started to materialize. It's really just the first inning. I think a lot of people don't understand that yet. Yeah. And I think, you know, we talked about podcasts before. I think the work that you guys do with this podcast and just having more and more education out there. If you remember when we were talking about that Murad podcast, it was actually quite hard to get good quality Bitcoin content back then. And I think what's interesting is now there's just so much, you know, even we're at CS Capital, we launched a podcast recently, obviously not a Bitcoin podcast, but what we do is we focus on a particular issue in the world, be it climate change, food security, energy security, something like this. And then we'll dig into the problem. We'll talk about a solution. And more often than not, the investment proposition by the expert that we've brought in ends up being Bitcoin is amongst other things. So it's quite funny that we've got this podcast, we're trying to address real problems. Obviously, we've designed it for institutional investors and alternative investors. And the conclusion often at the end is, well, probably need a bit of Bitcoin. Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, all roads do lead to Bitcoin one way or another. I'd be curious on that vein in particular. Rich, I know. So I'd come across your podcast this week just taking a look and seeing what you've been up to in preparations for this. And was it Eric sees? That was on the podcast recently. I caught a bit of that episode and that was interesting to hear just his entrepreneurial background and you know all the, the work that they've done over the decades with CS Capital. One thing that you mentioned that's really interesting to me and if you could share it, that'd be that'd be fascinating. Just like the investment case for Bitcoin in the fiscal perspective and well, the fiscal perspective, and then also just the asymmetric opportunity that exists within Bitcoin due to its properties are are pretty easy to explain or for someone to understand if they are willing to do the work and pay attention. But maybe in terms of geopolitics or energy, like some of the conversations you've had early on in the podcast, how have you found those lead into Bitcoin or, or how did these people come in with their background and maybe not see Bitcoin before and now after having a conversation, they're willing to open up their eyes and see a new perspective of how this could be a technology that could help to solve a problem there? Yeah, I think the energy security one is, is probably the most interesting. I always talk, talk about the fact that El Salvador's volcano bond when it eventually launches will be a complete game changer for broad energy security for energy rich nations or resource rich nations. Because if you think about a country like, say, Argentina, so Argentina is extremely rich in energy resources, in resources in general, but also has huge amounts of hydro in the north, huge solar panel farms up in the north as well with the propensity to grow massively. And they're still taking, you know, loans from the IMF, right? So if you could imagine a way that you can monetize all of that clean energy and start to use that for the benefit of the nation and then even do a sailor and raise even more money on the back of expansion of that infrastructure, making you even more energy secure. You actually move to a point of actually being, you know, having the IM FS involvement being completely redundant and so freeing these countries that have been really held in poverty for a very long time due to not being able to have, you know, a monetization of their resources that they have in cut in their country. Like you look at much of Central Africa, it's the same situation, you know, really heavily reliant on IMF loans to stay afloat, but you know, very resource rich countries. So this is this is the, the, the gap that we discussed actually in the first episode with the with a brilliant guy, a guy called David Lake, who we had on the podcast. He is a bitcoiner now as well. So he was at the summit with Jeff Booth. So yeah, we've we got him over the line as well. But yeah, I think a lot of these experts come at this, come at their particular problem. And look, we all know, we all know that meme fix the money, fix the world, right? And it's actually really true when you when you have a lot of these issues, Bitcoin does have a propensity to be able to change it. And one of the people that I want to get on the podcast to talk about environmental problems and, you know, climate change, I have young kids and you know, they, they're very worried about the environment. And that's something that is being focused on in their schools. And we see it more and more, you know, if you think about Bitcoin as a methane capture tool for gas flaring or landfill sites, this is actually a very, very interest, interesting way to monetize Bitcoin mining with stranded energy. So again, you actually reduce the amount of methane going into the environment because it's just it's cheaper and quicker for the landfill to burn it all off as opposed to potentially combust it in a way that will will create energy because no one's going to take that energy. But now you've got Bitcoin miners that can turn up and and reduce that that climate change impact. So yeah, lots of different avenues to that point, Jackson, where Bitcoin can fix the issue. Yeah, it's it's incredibly bullish for humanity and productivity because I don't know what is the most energy dense or oil rich. I think it's at least top three is Venezuela and Latin America. But the problem is that they don't have any currency or the currency continuing to be debased. They can't coordinate economic activity. And that's a very like extreme example to get the energy out of the Earth. But that's that's an extreme example. We experience this here anywhere, right? Where if you don't have a good form of capital, you can't plan for the future. You can't if it's continued to be debased, you cannot take a loan out plan. You see cut, you know, again, micro example, a restaurant goes out of business because their inputs are constantly changing and so they don't change them fast enough on the output, on the price for the customer and they get offsides. But what you just described bypasses that because ultimately you can source capital Bitcoin from anywhere in the world. You can structure a product, you can hold the capital in in a unit that's not being debased. You can coordinate that capital to go and pull the energy out of the earth, mind the BTC and then get it out. And that's just like the again, extreme example, but that plays anywhere. You don't even need any. You know, you can figure out your legal constructs. Obviously in different regions. It's going to matter, but even setting the mining to set up a wallet, we see this a lot in Texas where a lot of our teams base that Texas and Middle East are crime to get Bitcoin because they understand commodity commodities. And a lot of these investors maybe don't really want Bitcoin per SE to hold, but they want to mine it at A at a price less than the spot price and then auto convert into Fiat. And they set up their own wallets in these like limited partner structures. So they'll mine to it. So you can imagine you can start to set up. Some of those structures in any market to invest and bring resources that historically would not have been able to because you didn't have the financial structure in place. It's it's incredibly exciting. It is we're in a completely new paradigm and I I really do think that volcano bond is the catalyst to really start to change things with these IMF indebted countries. Does your Bitcoin custody setup keep you up at night? 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So we spot a lot of gaps that need to exist in the market structure, which is why I'm interested in talking about Switzerland because we've been looking at, you know, different companies looking to get set up there. Well, we're ultimately agnostic. We're looking at anything that's looking at the world through a lens of wool. Can I produce more Bitcoin by delivering value to the world and then sweep it into BTC? But when we invest from our LP's invest in Bitcoin, we invest in the companies in BTC. And then the companies is the kicker. They value the underlying unit more than the dollar. So they hold their treasury or at least a portion in BTC, which extends their runway and gives them an unfair advantage because they're more discerning with how they allocate capital. And you never have to touch the banking rails in a situation like that. You can because some people want to allocate dollars or some people need to accept dollars, but something like that had never been able to be done before. And so when you don't have to touch the traditional financial rails, all sorts of different manifestations can come in that are effectively more productive if you ever had to send a wire or anything that has to do with, you know, Swiss rails, Swift Rails. That's fascinating. See. Do you charge a performance fee on the returns over the Bitcoin allocated? Yeah. So hurdles are all. Everything's denominated in BTC. Amazing. Yeah, amazing. We should chat offline about that. Definitely happy to. I probably have some people that would be very interested to to look at this. And we honestly think this is just the future as well. We were the first. But ultimately when you go back, everybody kind of knows this. But the past 100 years have effectively been an anomaly, right, on this Fiat standard. If you go back, if you think about even allocation and capital, I like to joke and say never would have been like Henry Ford is a great example that built all of his wealth with his bare hands. Give all of that money to somebody that's never built anything or allocated. It doesn't make any sense. Somebody that was investment banking or you know, academic to say, here's money to go find net new builders to build because you've never built anything. So how would you know how to back test any of the process? But that's effectively what exists in Venture today. And that's why we see a lot of capital just burned or lit on fire. And so the angle is you take existing builders, but then with the lens of the alignment of a unit that can't be debased and is not, you're not trying to play hot potato because right and LP wants to get rid of the dollars because they're on fire all day long. So they need to go and find any allocator to put the capital to. And then the allocator needs to get rid of the dollars because they want to get more management fees. They want to raise a larger fund. Like people try to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoins. Like you don't need $100 million, There's nothing, there's not that many companies invested don't make that kind of money. So you try to raise a capital, but then every you have a hammer, everything needs to look like a nail. So then you're out there just looking at companies and this is where you see these companies get bit up without naming names, and now they're like crazy valuations that can't produce the returns. And then those people get told by the allocators, hey, run, go hire as many people, go scale as possible. But it's just like that. That doesn't make any sense. Bitcoin's cyclical. So you literally go higher, expend all that energy, destroy all that Bitcoin. Well, what if you just change that whole dynamic? Now the LP is more discerning with the BTC, the GP is more discerning with the BTC. And the most important part is the actual entrepreneur. The allocator is the most discerning with the underline. It's not to say you don't spend the Bitcoin, you just don't misuse it and you you look at the opportunity costs on AdWords hires through that lens of is bitcoins growth, will this outpace bitcoins growth by the the derivative returns? I think this is very interesting when you think about value alignment as well. When you factor value alignment into this, obviously when you're doing venture, you're backing a founder, right? And I think what's very interesting for you is you're backing founders that are Bitcoiners. Like they have that mentality, or at least you know where their mentality is going, right? Because Bitcoiners tend to end up in the same place. You've got a long term mindset, low time preference, as you say, you're very careful where you're going to allocate that Bitcoin because it's so precious, right? It's not, it's not those dollars. OK, fine, let's do this, let's do that. Let's run around, try and create some frenzy. Know when it's Bitcoin you're allocating extremely carefully. And that's, that's insaling perceptive because it's something Brian and I talk about where individuals in the Bitcoin venture space will talk about. Well, you allocate, it's kind of like leverage on top of Bitcoin. And I look at that as a negative, not as a positive because outside of a few things like buying and custody Bitcoin, there's not really a lot of venture type returns. But so you're basically layering and risk on risk because like lightning is a great example. We've never really found a use case. So you're layering on how do I like potentially find a use case. So you get the risk of venture plus you get the risk of the volatility of Bitcoin because if you invest in venture that's already risky, but then you invest in the perceived or the potential use case for a new form of bitcoins use, which generally outside of buying and holding from a venture perspective, it's not, it's very hard to justify a return. But what Brian and I talked about, and this is the firm's called early Riders in us being agnostic to it's not dedicated to just solely Bitcoin infrastructure is to your point is that as individuals like yourself that come from backgrounds of 10 plus years professional experience, they're going to look at their existing firms and look at it through the lens of understanding Bitcoin deeply. And they're going to say this is full of fat and bloat and inefficiencies, especially with deflationary tools. And now I can go and out compete them because I know all of where all the gaps are, use a better form of money. So you get the benefit of underlying better form of capital from an entrepreneurial perspective. And then you get the upside of them looking at the world through the lens of understanding Bitcoin, but not the risk of, oh, I'm going to go find the next way to scale Bitcoin, the next third layer and all the things associated. So it's interesting you picked up on that because that's where we're really excited. The number of entrepreneurs or LP's that we have in the fund are just like world class because when you have high signal, the right people find you because it's like, oh, this is what's been missing. Absolutely, absolutely. I think it almost might be the ultimate hack for venture capital. You know it's Bitcoin only companies allocating in Bitcoin. And you're, you're right, because this is the ultimate hack to actually getting back to efficient use of money, right? It's just like, I really like money. Money doesn't grow on trees and we forgot about it. And so it might put now everybody thinks money grows on trees. Everybody wants the next round, you know all the stories, but the reality is Bitcoin doesn't grow on trees and Bitcoin has opportunity and Bitcoin has, you know, there's a cost of capital, it's Bitcoin. And as everyone starts looking at the world through that, you literally get to the most efficient use of that capital. And the kicker is, I like to joke, it's like on a scale of one to 10, whether it's listed companies or unlisted companies, there's a certain amount of fat that exists because we've been on this Fiat standard. So the goal is to as Bitcoin, you start to look, you start to look in the most and those people will out compete all the other people over a long and a time horizon because just the most efficient use of that money, even if it takes longer. And this is what Henry Ford figured out very early on when there would be deflationary periods. He would sell everything even though he had to take it at a loss. And then he'd close down the factory, get more efficient and come back and outrun everyone because that's what you're supposed to do when misallocation of capital happens, not continue to paper over. And we just kind of all forgot about this. You. You really? Need some of the history on that. Yeah, you picked up on one of the core things to me is just the sort of realignment of incentives in private investment venture, whatever it is. I think those incentives got very distorted over the past fifty to 100 years as we had basically, you know, free money that could be printed infinitely that distorts all the incentives down the line from LP's to GPS to founders. We're just sort of going back to a time when when those incentives were more aligned. And the other really fascinating thing about this for particularly the entrepreneur and the founder is you, you might only need to raise capital once, maybe twice, but you might just be able to do it once and extend your runway as as your Bitcoin treasury grows and then you can avoid, you know, further dilution into the future. So it's, it's again, it's fully just aligning the the incentives between all the different parties involved and, and really just rethinking how capital should be allocated within a Bitcoin lens. Absolutely, absolutely. I like it. I think for me it really comes back to the values as well because you want to make sure you're investing in a founder that is honest. And I don't know why, but it just Bitcoin leads you to more of a honest purist way of thinking, right? Bitcoin is truth. It leads you to truth. You want to represent that same truth in you, right? So when you're backing a founder, you need a founder that you can trust, obviously, that you can trust him to make the right decisions. And that that truth aspect, that long term mindset, all of these things come together for Bitcoin and the value system that it creates. So outside again, I think you guys have found an interesting hack here. It's impressive how fast you picked up on it cuz I don't know how quick like a sharing cuz it's obviously a little bit novel, but you hit the nail on the head. There's nothing more scarce than the human capital, like scarce than Bitcoin. And that's the component, the way to execute on this. And the beautiful part about Bitcoin is when you meet somebody, you know, right off the bat, I like to joke and it's like we all agree that on we agree on 90% of things, we don't want people taking our money. The last 10% is on the margins on like, you know, you know what's happening here in local politics. And once you cut through all that noise, you just immediately know like where somebody stands. And then you can start to build on the merits of like, you know, the professional experience and things like that. So it really isn't interesting kind of cheat code to to find the right operators from a founder perspective or just like folks that have joined our firm, you kind of know right off the bat where they where they sit. Yeah, I was in, I was in Amsterdam with the boys at Relay and they had a lot of the team there and it's just, it's, it's so good to see them so enthusiastic and so driven and so excited about what they're doing because they're so behind passionately what they're building because they believe so much in the underlying Bitcoin behind the whole system. So yeah, it's, it's, it just creates the best outcomes I think for for venture investors. Yeah, Rich, maybe on, on that Bane. I'd be curious to hear more about what you're seeing in Europe as it relates to Bitcoin only businesses, Bitcoin institutional adoption, whatever, wherever you want to take it. But maybe a perspective that you have that we don't necessarily have being based in the States. And you, again, whether you want to touch on specific companies or specific countries within Europe that you're seeing more adoption, more favorable regulatory environment. But really, I'd be curious to hear what you're seeing in your seat. Yeah. I mean, one thing that I found quite interesting in in Switzerland is that you have this crypto Valley in Zug which has been around for a while and there's some big, big Bitcoiners that live there and and stay there. And what I found is though, that not a lot of them are purest Bitcoin Maxis because I think that because they've been in crypto, I was talking to someone about this the other day, because they've been in crypto for so long, they get the inside track on, you know, this new token that's going to list or whatever. And so they can make the 500X and then convert it back into Bitcoin. And so in a funny kind of way, they're still shit coiners. And so they're not quite of the Bitcoin mindset that you see much more in the international community. So I always go to the Bitcoin conference in the USI just, as I said, got back from Bitcoin Amsterdam. You know that mindset that you get at a Bitcoin conference to the people that you're likely to meet there, they're pure Bitcoiners, right? Whereas when you talk to someone at Crypto Valley and Zerg where even though these guys are massive holders of Bitcoin, they're still shit coining around and mucking around in this nonsense, which is something that I, I find quite weird. Even if you say to a Bitcoin, I look, you can, you can go and invest in this token and make a quick 500%, they're not going to do it. They're pretty much not going to do it because they're like, well, yeah, but no thanks. I don't, I don't want to run the risk of losing my Bitcoin and I'm very relaxed with my Bitcoin. When we talk about asset allocation, you don't even need to bother with it. I know that I'm going to be making, you know, significant multiples in a dollar based system anyway, so I don't need to muck around. So I think that's quite an interesting thing that I've discovered here being in Switzerland. I would say in terms of Bitcoin only companies, they're quite rare. Obviously Raleigh is, is 1. I think Relay's competitors, I mean Relay have done a very, very good job of marketing across Europe and, and being out there and being trusted and you know, they're just so passionate about what they do. I think most of their competitors have disappeared or fallen away. So those are Bitcoin company or bit or they were Bitcoin focused companies that have have sort of gone away just because they've been out competed by Relay. But yeah, it's it's not so, so robust over here in terms of Bitcoin only companies. What we are starting to see and obviously again through my involvement with Relay is we're seeing more and more corporates bit real estate companies through to just general, you know, carpentry companies putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Slowly starting to understand that this can be a very interesting way to manage the treasury of the company. So this is something that is somehow getting out there. I don't know how it's getting out there, but people are are discovering it more and more. And yeah, so corporate adoption in the small and medium sized enterprises are are getting getting O fait with Bitcoin. But yeah, Bitcoin only companies is they're still quite rare. And as I say, the Swiss community is still a little bit shit coining. That mirror is pretty much very similar to the US. It's very hard to be Bitcoin only because unless you're going to, you know, cell phone and have been holding Bitcoin or like we said, reference finding on the, the Bitcoin allocator side, it's very hard to convince institutional capital to look at that because they're still looking at it as a diversification, you know, multiple asset sector versus how can you build a strong business, which to their credit, it's very hard to build a very profitable or any kind of profitable Bitcoin business because they're not a lot of things to do with it other than buying and holding. But curious, rich on the, the banking and lending side, because in the West, we're still, however, like in the US specifically, we still haven't seen, there's obviously the lot of the, the regulatory hurdles that have been in place that are starting to get lifted. I think there's like 2 SEC exemptions being wine, one other from a banking perspective that are letting them custody the asset. But it was shocking to me to find out that there's multiple Swiss banks that allow clients to the custody and then allow them to lend against the asset, which I think is just a natural part of the market structure for folks that don't want to sell and want to do other things with the underlying curious like what's built into that? And is that just part of Swiss banking and being very forward thinking or is there any other kind of factors involved? It's, it's not, I mean the, the Swiss banks, you know, they've been watching their pie get reduced obviously by US regulation in terms of how you deal with US clients and just being very clamped down on the whole banking secrecy side of things that really impeded the, the Swiss banking advantage that they had for many years. Now they are having to push into being more innovative and so that's why you've seen many of the Swiss banks adopt crypto and be more broad. I think that what they're doing on lending on Bitcoin is impressive. We still bank sees. So we have as part of the overall group. We actually have a private bank as part of us as well, and we haven't got to the point of lending money against Bitcoin yet. That requires obviously a system that is 24/7. And so this is, you know, it's quite far away from the way that the traditional banking infrastructure works. You know, it's very hard to imagine bankers working on a Saturday or Sunday and dealing with margin calls and dealing with this type of thing. And so I'm not actually sure how the banks that are doing in Switzerland. Are actually doing it yet it seems very early and very nascent and I think they probably only do it with clients that have significant assets where they're not going to have a margin call and the LTV loan to value is very, very low. But yeah, it's, it's not something we've we've got comfortable yet in our banking division. Yeah, it's not for the faint, faint of heart. Maybe we can chat when we talk about earlier writers offline. My my previous company, I think we're the only retail lender left standing in the 2022 space. And it goes to your point. They'll the loan to values have to be right. And then it's you're it's a 24/7 game and you have to have really good relationships with your clients and and really protect them from themselves. And then the the kicker is not rehypothecate or generally people get in trouble is with the rehabilitation, especially in traditional finance because they're not used to the volatility profile of Bitcoin. And so they think it's, it's not risky to go get some, some, you know, interest on that lending in one or two hands removed. But then that happens. Rich, on the so your point about just Swiss banking having to be more innovative just given some of the US regulatory environment changes over the years. I'm curious like for Bank CS or just for other private banks in Switzerland that are rolling out Bitcoin and crypto related services, is that more so demand driven? Are your private clients asking for these types of products directly with their existing banking relationships? Or is it more of a proactive and aggressive move by private banks to differentiate themselves among the banking sector in Switzerland? How how do you think about that? And maybe what are some things that you're excited about within the bank, if you can share or just about Swiss banking in general as it relates to Bitcoin related services and adoption? Yeah. I think it's a bit of both. So when when we get through the bull market cycle, which is probably going to happen next year, you're going to have a huge amount of clients wanting to get access to Bitcoin directly. But you know, you're going to have a whole host of shit coins that they're going to want to trade. And they're going to want to trade it in custody at their bank rather than at an exchange that they probably don't trust as much. So, you know, I think the conversation at sea started in 2020-2021 and the product was launched in 2022 where obviously there wasn't a lot of demand by then. I think it launched just a few weeks before FTX, but then you know, now that's building again. Obviously being a crypto bank, they've had onboarding of clients that have crypto holdings seizes a very respected name in Switzerland. It's not very well known outside in the US, but it is a very respected name if you look at the other providers that predominantly crypto firms. So seize is actually one of the very few actual real banks that existed prior to crypto that's actually offering crypto services. But I would say, yeah, it's a little bit of both. There's a little bit of, you know, having to innovate, having to drive things forward, having to find ways to compete in the back of, you know, banking secrecy going away. But then there's also that little bit of the demand side coming through through the bull market cycles. But also you've got a generational change happening in wealth as well. You know, you're starting to see the millennials, the the Gen. Z's start to inherit money. Switzerland's a really interesting place because it doesn't really have inheritance tax, which is why you still have some very wealthy families here because they're not getting destroyed every generational change through inheritance taxation. So, you know, that's obviously not the case for the US It's not the case for the UK where I'm from. So it's been quite another culture shock for me here is just how wealthy some of these families are. I mean, it's just like everybody's worth 10s of millions, which is at least, you know. So, yeah, there's some very wealthy families and they we're seeing that generational change now. So the Gen. Z as the millennials are starting to pick it up and they are paying attention to this space. They're interested in Bitcoin, they're interested in crypto. Unfortunately, they're interested in, you know, NFTS and other nonsense as well. And you know, every time I hear one of them sit down and say talk to me about web three, I'm like, oh, please, I can't. But yeah, it's again, it's a bit like, how do you sit in a meeting and talk about hedge funds with a guy? It's the same sort of thing. You've got to kind of come to an investor where they're ready and help guide them to to the right place. So rich I was. I thought that was an interesting point that you made about there not being inheritance tax in Switzerland and just the idea of generational wealth there and that being more prevalent than in other countries. And that ties into something you mentioned as well, just as relates to Bank CS getting into Bitcoin and crypto related services and being a trusted name and a traditional finance firm, a banking partner that these families are already familiar with. Whereas the other companies that are participating in the space are more crypto native and don't have the same brand recognition and level of trust that your firm's established. And we've seen that a lot too as it relates to our business and how we think about expansion plans. Just one anecdote is that we have a sister company in the Middle East in the in the UAE on Ramina. And part of the idea there is that people want to work with businesses that are local to their region and that that have trusted partners in the traditional finance space. So I just wanted to react to that because I think there is we would all agree that Bitcoin has a ton of alignment as it relates to generational wealth. And there's obviously much more of a bias and interest in Bitcoin by millennial meals and Gen. Z than there are in baby boomers. And then there's this massive transfer of wealth happening that's really just underway now and will happen over the next 1520 years where you have somewhere between like 70 or $80 trillion of wealth that's being transferred from the baby boomers to these younger generations. And they all have a more of an inclination toward Bitcoin and digital assets. So I think that's a huge tailwind and it really positions well for bank sees because you're ahead of the curve as it relates to being a really trusted name in banking and traditional finance and being early to the Bitcoin and crypto native services as well. Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, we're excited about being positioned where we are. And I think Sees Capital is obviously very well positioned to help advise some of these families in terms of the way that they want to, they want to allocate the product that we currently have is AUS dollar denominated product that provides a return in dollars. So I'm very interested about what you're saying because we've had, we've had some interesting demand from Bitcoin Bitcoiner clients where they're like, look, love the fact that you can deliver a 15 to 20% return product, but it in dollars, but I'm never going to sell my big, sell my Bitcoin $4 to get a 15 to 20% return. So what can you do in Bitcoin? And so we're at the point where we're starting to say, OK, is there something to do here? If we were to deliver a product denominated in Bitcoin, maybe a lower return than 15 to 20%, take the risk right down. As you said, Mike, you know, you want to make sure that you're super careful with the allocation of that Bitcoin, like you must not lose the Bitcoin, right? So maybe take the volatility of the fund down, be much more cautious with the strategies that you're allocating to. And then, you know, maybe you can get a 5 to 10% return with a volatility around 2 and a sharper around 2 as well. You know, that then becomes a very interesting product for Bitcoin. So yeah, we're kind of we're going down and seeing what we can offer in terms of these types of products. But I think, you know, coming back to the comment that we just we were discussing earlier about, you know, what you guys have done and having ABTC denominated venture fund. I think that's something that, you know, we could have some sort of discussion about as as a product that we would be not officially promoting. But you know, when people come to us and say they're looking at Venture, I think that this is, this could be a very interesting thing to be looking at. Yeah. And you guys are in a really interesting spot, maybe one of the best because I didn't recognize that SEES was historically a traditional bank and then adopted Bitcoin as a strategy. Because then it allows for all sorts of like esoteric cross collateralization products, which can help you get to those returns. Because it's generally really hard just to get to a BTC return if you're like lending it out for other people to trade it. Because they're, the problem with all that is they're denominating their return in dollars. And that's where people get offsides. But if you're able to structure products where BTC's infused in a in some kind of debt facility or whatever you would create for that return because you have the clients and the assets you can, you can do that. You're awesome first. I missed the question, Mike. I'm sorry. It was no question. It was basically a recognition that you guys are in a unique spot to do some kind of Bitcoin denominated return profile because you have other assets that you can incorporate into a structured product. You're not, you're not sitting at a like a hedge fund or a crypto lending desk lending out Bitcoin to traders to swing it around to potentially give you back your two to 5% or whatever you're doing. You can structure it in traditional products that are less volatile have like, you know, claims on it from other regulatory, you know, relationships that you know that this asset sitting infused with these other assets when you make loans out or however you would, you know, source the additional capital for investors parking at Bitcoin with you. What I would say is that one of the things that we're obviously doing with the dollar based fund is we're allocating to strategies where hedge funds can use it as collateral, right? So they're using the dollar as collateral, they're doing a basis trade or they're doing a volatility arbitrage trade. But now we switch that out and we say, OK, it's Bitcoin. Like your startup companies, we say take the Bitcoin, make the return on the Bitcoin. And then that then is providing you as they say, you know, maybe you're not going to make the same spread as you might make with the dollars, but we don't care if it's a, you know, 358 percent return in Bitcoin, then I think, you know, and any Bitcoin or I know will be pretty happy with that as a return profile delivered to you by a Swiss banking group. And that's that's the thing that's starting to be of interest. And I think that's why what you guys are doing is also of interest. Do you have any target IRR on the fund? That's a good question. Brian May be able to speak to it a little better. On the would I look at it, I look at it a little, I look at it from the opportunity cost of the Bitcoin that's being given up and then where we look at from an equity perspective. So the percentage of Bitcoin like we basically have a higher hurdle rate. We make an allocation of looking at double digit equity percentages in businesses. And to Brian's point, because ultimately we look at a company raising once, if not maybe twice total. And so it's less from a total. Like when you look at IRR from a acquisition perspective, most companies from venture are looking to get acquired. And a lot of this thesis was based on building on ramp where we built with Bitcoin as its denomination because we were spending our own money to build the fund. And so the way we looked at is from a downside, how do we protect and the downside is from a Bitcoin positive business. So we can, you know, pair bills and feed our family. And the upside starts to look like venture from equity value being delivered to the enterprise value of the company. So you get the downside protection of a solid business and the upside of anything where it can go. But it's just, it's in congruence with like how you would build in general because you would, you don't know, I like, you know, like a baby, you don't know if it's going to be Michael Jordan or it's just going to play high school basketball. You can only foster the environment in which it's been brought into the world. And same thing with an entrepreneur. And so to your point, the downside is protected by reoccurring revenue to return the BTC back to the investor. So the downside is protected by the reoccurring revenue to return back to the investor from the OR the allocation perspective. The upside is the equity value from an acquisition perspective. And then just depending on the type of firm you might be able to buy hold that you're returning capital to LP's investors similar to like something how we think about honor. If you're building this as a generational like private banking firm. And then the upside for certain investments would be like, well, it's bright for a bank. This is partially where we're looking at certain lending businesses because banks are just going to need to buy this because it's very right for acquisition versus building because the custody is really fundamental to all lending that even though nobody talks about it because you got to make sure the underlying is secure, transparent, or you basically get what you wake up one day and you're offsides. And it's part, I don't know if Jackson shared of maybe we can pull it up, but our models really like the the cornerstone of all of this because we feel that we have this in in bitcoins adoption, this inflection point where the market believed the market effectively is believed, especially on the Bitcoin side. We're going to scale with self custody. We're going to scale with plastic devices. And if you really think about it, it's just like literally impossible to to do simply because at a certain point people just start breaking in everybody's houses and like robbing their families. Like that's just what happens when you hold billions or hundreds of millions of dollars. But then the other alternative was you leave it all on Coinbase, which also can't happen. And so that's really, yeah, big component of this is that nobody's really bringing solutions to the market of like, how do we actually create structured products when somebody's holding, which we all probably on this podcast believe somebody's going to hold anywhere between 70 to 100% of their wealth and BTC, Well, that's not going to happen on a plastic device. Like people will never get there. You'll just hold the base dollars because at least they can't burn down or get hit with a hurricane. The other side of it is you're not going to leave it on Coinbase because we all know that's the probably the worst thing you could ever do if you're holding your wealth and BTC. And so that's where this multi institution model comes about. But then you can start to really with the new design servers create other structured products. So lending is a great example because now you have it's basically governance built into the the custody model, which you can't do with gold, right? That's kind of where gold failed, as you had to leave it with a central entity. Mike, I have a question for you in terms of this is a debate I had in Bitcoin Amsterdam. I was on a panel talking about both venture and hedge fund strategies in in crypto and Bitcoin. And the the the question came and the way I answered it was the question was can you invest in a non profitable company and have them put Bitcoin on the balance sheet? So my question to you is, do you, is your funds Series A, are you targeting cash flow positive businesses or are you still at very early stage seed for these businesses in terms of what you're doing? It's, it's a great question. I don't think nonprofitable businesses should put Bitcoin on their balance sheet or not to be nonprofit, not to be nonprofitable. It's just it's it's actually more of an art than a science, because if you don't have any more bullets in the chamber, you can't do it. If you do have bullets in the chamber, then you can't because you have to basically price the risk. And what I mean by that is this isn't similar like what we weren't profitable when we started on ramp, but we put all of our treasury in Bitcoin because we had bullets in the chamber. We know people, we can raise capital. I hold Bitcoin, I could lend it to the business. So you have to be able to have bullet that it's a it's a it's an art than a it's more art than science. But then to your other point, we're pre seed, seed, seed, but ultimately like I would say less of around. We're at the end of the day value investors. And so we when everybody talks and venture about access, it's like there's no such thing as access in Bitcoin. People will take your money if you go to them. Like if you put on Twitter, I'm restarting a company. People like any Bitcoin, unless it's like some crazy fun that is just like completely unaligned people will take Fiat money. But where access really comes out is if you've built and you know how to build and people don't need your money, they need your expertise. And so one of our recent companies that's come in is already cash flow positive, generating about 3 to $4 million, doesn't need the capital. They've been approached, but they've been hitting their head against engineering design and all the things that you need to when you're trying to scale. And so they're literally giving us a double digit percentage of their business to incorporate all the things. And so we're going to just start generating BTC right into the fund, right off the investment. And so that's the idea there. And going back to your earlier question, Rich, just on the sort of target, I would think of it more as like a multiple uninvested capital of like 1.25 X in Bitcoin terms. That would be in Bitcoin terms. So that's, that's sort of what you were sort of alluding to around like it's perfectly fine if the if the numbers themselves are smaller, if they're in Bitcoin terms, right. And so it's like, absolutely, that's sort of the mindset you have to get behind. Mm hmm. Yeah, no, I'd agree completely. Well, Rich, very good, want to be mindful of your time we're closing up here. Anything we didn't touch on that maybe you just wanted to share some quick thoughts on or if not, where's the best place to directs people that enjoyed the show today and want to either follow your work or your podcast or get in touch with you? I appreciate that, Jackson. Yeah. The podcast is called Seize the Future Syz. One word. You can find it on Twitter. It's on obviously on YouTube and Spotify and all of that. And then I'm at Richard Byworth on Twitter and I think on LinkedIn as well. LinkedIn is, I think I'm the only Richard Byworth in the world. So you'll you'll be able to find me. It's a bit of a rare name, but yeah, if I'm not the only one in the world, I'm the one that's working at Seas Capital. So there you go. Awesome. Well, it was a pleasure, Rich, really enjoyed getting to know you today and appreciate all the perspectives you shared. So thanks for coming on. Yeah, this is a great. Chat, guys, it was a lot of fun. Yeah. Thanks, Rich. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. 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