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It all comes down to computers communicating. The information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold. Is it still rat poison? Probably rat poison squared. We need to get into the world of OK, this is actually foundational technology. What the Internet of Money does is it creates a single network which can do a microtransaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing. The role of gun. The one thing that's missing that that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. Hey guys, thanks for tuning into another episode of final settlement. It was a fun podcast covering all things that have happened the past, you know, week and 1/2 in the digital asset space positives around Bitcoin adoption, along with all coin mania coming back. Quick word and exciting announcement. You'll be one of the first to hear it. We just launched On Ramp Guardian, really excited to get this out because we've heard from the market all over the board as it comes to security with clients of on Ramp and then prospective clients that are looking to leverage our solution, but have certain aspects of giving up what they deem as control as a negative. It's something that I talked to clients a lot about, if clients have come on from, you know, 50 to $250 million and really explaining this notion of a, it's not all or nothing, but also where we're heading to. You're going to be praying for giving up that control as the market starts to realize you don't want hundreds of millions of dollars or even 10s of millions of dollars in your possession. And So what Honor and Guardian does is effectively brings out withdrawal delays, deep fake protection against AI, Instant Three's functionality, and then obviously our Lloyds of London insurance. And then for private clients, it goes even deeper, really thinking through different withdrawal freezes, which has come up a lot, you know, up to 365 days. Custom velocity controls around the amount of capital that can moved. And then a real proprietary 3FA protocol where you have to leverage the blockchain, specifically the Bitcoin blockchain to move Utxos around to prove that it's verifiably you in an objective manner. Really excited about this. If you want to learn more, if you're already a client, you could just, you know, activate it via the web platform. And then if you're looking to learn more, please feel free to book a consultation or shoot me a note. Always happy to hear from folks, Michael at honor@bitcoin.com. Now on to the rest of the show. All righty, welcome back to another episode of Final Settlement. Today is Monday, August 25th, 10:13 AM Eastern Time. I'm back in New York boys, no more pretty beach skate behind me. How was your weekend? How we doing? Big list, Big list today big. List I feel I'm not 100% but like 95% which last week I was like 60. So I feel like you know, 1,000,000 bucks. I'm excited to chat. I'm in Nashville right now. I woke up it was 59°, which from like a native Texan in you know, August to wake up 59° is pretty wild. So feeling good and just ready for the spicy takes. It's too much bullshit, too much things getting thrown around that the market believes to be true that just aren't. So I'm going to try to bring the heat in this one. Yeah, lots of lots of different topics to get into. We'll talk a little private equity. We'll talk a little custody landscape, some new research that early writers put out last week. Maybe, though where we're going to start is some news from the Trump administration. I'll pull up first here a a truth social tweet, Truth social post. I don't know what they're called from the dawn. It is my great honor to report the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of Intel, a Great American company that has an even more incredible future. So this made some waves over the past several days in what is a pretty, pretty strong departure from sort of the typical level of government involvement in the private sector and a public company like Intel. The government just coming out and saying, you know, now we own 10% of that. So there's a few other links that I'll find for this, but what are the immediate reactions and thoughts around this guy's? Keep this one up for right now. This is, there's so much in here that we could talk about this for a week straight, but one of them is in the post you said the United States paid nothing for these shares. The shares are now valued at approximately $11 billion. That's not true. They the money comes from somewhere. It doesn't come from nowhere. So they gave significant amount of tax breaks as well as just, you know, they, you can also say the, the United States paid nothing for these, this amount of money that we printed during COVID and it's now worth like $5 billion or whatever amount they did. And it we all pay for it in inflation as well as taxes. In addition, to see there hurts it's it's difficult to see some winners and losers being picked when a lot of these large organizations continue to be able to have the ability to find out how do you monetize all the tax breaks as well as they can. The smaller companies just don't have the ability to. Jackson talked last week about a family Italian restaurant in his neighborhood closing after 40 years because of the impacts of inflation. The while Intel, which is losing money, gets additional stake in an investment from the government. But it's when, when looking at this, it's interesting to see it's a, it's a departure from recent activity here in the US of the government not taking any stakes in companies. But it's actually very common when looking at the broader landscape of, you know, how companies benefit from or the US government or governments in general benefit from taking stakes in companies. So in the past, during world wars and financial crises, respectively, the US government took stakes in railways as well as, you know, banks and AIG, et cetera, during the financial crisis. I guess, you know, maybe we'll look back on this and say that we're currently in the midst of the debt crisis, which is going on and that's probably why they're doing this. But when looking at other countries and what ask or what stakes in government or stakes in companies that they have, it's pretty similar to what you would expect. It's there are four kind of key areas. One, Financial services like banks and potentially stablecoin issuers moving forward, defense companies in critical parts and then the flow of key material. So you know, I'm just looking at a list of other other countries and what they've taken stakes of the United Kingdom, coal, rail, steel industries during World War 2 as well as 2008. The banking sector bailouts. France during World War 2 was automotive and now telecommunications and defense. Germany, a lot of aviation. Italy banking and then we kind of just going through the list, it's a lot of energy production, oil banking, so just key critical parts that go into economies especially during times of turmoil. So, and it's really interesting that the they said this morning that they're going to be taking share of additional companies moving forward, those that continue to get tax credits from the government. So I think it's just very, it's something to watch and I would expect those key industries to to get some more attention moving forward. This makes no fucking sense. Yep. You didn't have a take. You just shared us a history on like what, what like what's going on? But this makes so like we it has, it makes zero sense. Like this is so insane. I don't even know what to make of it because everything feels like when it comes out, it's just like, oh, we throw these things out of God. I don't even know what's the most recent new insane thing. Like what was it the Trump files where they're like gonna release him and they're not. And we just like all like laughing off like these things get thrown out that the US government's taking 10% stake in a private business. And we just like, well, this was done before and This is why it's like this is the most bearish take on like humanity and like the United States specifically. And the reason for it is it's, it's very similar to like we've got super Co opted and, and our brains have got a Co-op different first principles thinking around the notion of the very often it's thought out like who will build the roads, right? Like we need the government to build the roads. It's like, no, no, that's not how it works. Like humans, they deliver value, they create value, they have moral integrity, and ultimately if the road around their community needs to be built, they will figure out how to build the roads. This is how all of humanity has existed. This is how we've like delivered value. He goes across and reminds me very similarly of like the TLT pods. When we talk to Jackson, he would bring up Ubi on Bitcoin. It's just like a, there's only like levels that we forgot to build in. And so going back to what this is saying is that we do not feel that the private market understands how to develop and create efficient technology. So the government is going to take a stake and help and influence that outcome, which we understand the more, the further we send our money away, the more inefficient the allocation of the capital. But then and then as that capital gets more inefficiently allocated, the more inefficient the outcome of the production. And you referenced it and and when you kicked off what you were sharing about nobody will pay for it. It goes back to like another first principle thing that I think we like all missed is there's I think Brad Gerstner. And who is it Brad Gerstner and Bill Bill Bill Gurley were talking about whatever the new like save a child like and all these things always sound good. It's like where you're going to give a kid like $1500 when they're first born, you're going to lock it up and it's going to get put into public markets is going to compound. It's like, well, that's somebody's money. Like it's not free money. And is there a better use for that money? It's like, yes, by the family that like made it and then they would save their own kids money or you know, child like if this is it's a free market endeavor, it's just ludicrous. But it makes sense because we're just in a weird, ludicrous world where the government's going to tower that from national security to domestic production, which brings up the other two parts of like, isn't this basically what like a mix between, you know, private and public market, like fashion fascism is? Where's the line when you start to create? Is it? You mentioned some vehicles, but what about tech companies like Facebook? And then we saw what happened with COVID and how insane the government allocates any amount of resources. So the whole thing's preposterous, basically. Yeah, I I would agree with all that. I I am definitely in the camp of this is pretty insane just in terms of a few things you referenced in there, like the blurring of the boundaries between public and private. I think this while Liam laid out some historical precedent for these types of things, this explicit of a of a blurring, you know, hasn't happened in a really long time, at least in sort of public markets like this. And so the other big thing that sticks out here is like this is very clearly, you know, if you've been listening to this administration over the past eight months or so that they've been in power, like they have somewhat forecasted or signalled this in the sense that like they view specific industries as national security assets. And so like, it's, you know, while it is a jarring move in terms of, you know, blurring those lines in a pretty explicit way, they have sort of been forecasting that like they view a lot of these things as almost existential to national security. But to your point, Michael, like it does like this is sort of, you know, what you would expect the Chinas of the world to do is just, you know, take over certain areas of public markets. Like it is pretty wild in that respect in terms of what this does. Like the implications of it are, you know, prices, markets get distorted as a as a result of these sort of capital allocation decisions at the government level where again, like, yeah, somebody's paying for it. And so that that sort of inserts some amount of moral hazard into markets, into these industries. Generally speaking, if there is a, you know, free money printer allocator stepping into the market and taking control of, of, you know, at least parts of certain industries. My, my two favorite parts are the notion of purchasing the stake in the company. You're pretty much it's, it's like the they're like they're just really very gas lighting mechanisms in the sense of if you wanted the free market to to out compete Intel, you basically assured with a move like this that they won't because imagine being an entrepreneur in any form in the US government and your competitor takes a stake like you're just, you know, what are you supposed to do there? This unlimited amount of capital and involvement, whether it's government contracts. But the other one that's fun to bring up is so the government's going to start buying stakes for national security perspectives of, you know, companies. Well, you know, there's a nice business over there that's sitting on, I don't know, the next World reserve currency, what is it, 550,000 BTC? That feels more than that. Yeah, that feels almost 700 real. Convenient to be able to normalize the notion of taking positions in businesses. So yeah, good luck with that. Yeah, it makes no sense at all. But I'm, and I'm not condoning or, or supporting this, but I'm just saying it's, it's the very early days and, and it's going to happen even more and more. And it's very difficult to see for a company like Intel because what do you do if you're, you're the competitor? It's kind of just like what Bill Gurley talks about, just like all this amount of crazy funding that goes into, you know, the Ubers versus Lyfts. And if you don't take the money, then you're at a disadvantage to others. And same with all these late stage companies who are just being asked and flooded with money to go develop the new AI. You, you. It's not a great situation if you're the competitor and dealing with, OK, well, the government has a stake in my competitor. What do I do now? Yeah. Well, times, but like Michael said, this will be forgotten about in a week. We just gloss over it and move on to the next thing, which is kind of insane. And yeah, I'm glad you brought up the the MSCR point, which is obviously where, you know, a lot of Bitcoiners took this on Twitter of like, you know, maybe, maybe you'll, you'll think a little bit more critically about proxy exposure to Bitcoin and not not actually owning the underlying and, and trusting a corporate entity to hold it. And also, you know, trusting layers of counterparty risk beneath that as well. Puts it into context that these things are possible. And if it's occurring with Intel, why couldn't it happen with MSTRI? Think is a is a reasonable question to be asking. Moving on from there, there was a few private equity related tweets I saw that I wanted to share. This first one is basically a lot of PE firms, large PE firms, KKRS of the world, Bain Capital, Goldman have started using commitments to continuation funds as collateral. So this is basically, you know, indicative of a few things to pull out of this, but basically there's a liquidity crunch in private equity. Generally speaking. Some numbers that are quoted in this Bloomberg report are are distributions to investors have collapsed over the past several years. So what was around 29% of NAB being distributed about a decade ago is now 11%. So these firms are are struggling to return cash. And so this is a clear sign of sort of a liquidity squeeze across the industry. And so they're resorting to new forms of financial engineering and sort of shifting risk around. And so to avoid sort of for sales at discounts, firms are now using what are called continuation funds to basically use those new commitments as collateral for new borrowing. So this is at various, some, some Ponzi elements to, to, to everything that's happening here and being described basically, you know, financial engineering, masking the underlying liquidity and these delays and inevitable markdowns that are occurring in, in the PE space more broadly. And so all of this is, you know, adding some success, systemic risk and vulnerabilities in the PE space broadly. And you know, marks a, a shift that we've seen over the past few years with, you know, exits being harder, basically masking over what what are probably a lot of markdowns in these portfolios. And so just shifting the risk, shifting these investments into continuation funds and then actually barring against those commitments as well. Any thoughts on this guys? I think the biggest thing is, I mean this is the trend we'll watch for the next 10 plus years is counterparty risk and the insolvencies of various funds and sovereigns. When it comes to all this misallocated capital. We the numbers get so big that we gloss over like when you hear billion dollar fund goes out of business or markdown, we talked about it a week ago, over 2 weeks ago, the open door marked down from the billion dollar valuation to like $50 million. It's like that capital is destroyed and somebody is capital has been destroyed an individual, an investor in the fund. And this is that that reversion back to what we've been talking about in sound money and gold and Bitcoin that the markets going to wake up and realize like the risk free rate is whatever gold purchasing power looks like on an annualized basis or BTC and you don't have to go make these risky bats anymore. But the reality is we're going to play this out for so long because if you think about London School economics, Chicago School of Business, like these academics and people cannot fathom that it's as simple as just buying one or two assets and then just going back to their life and trying to produce value. And their whole livelihoods are built around trying to either outsmart or extract value from the markets. So I see this persisting much longer, but we're speaking to the individuals that kind of get it. And that's basically underpins a lot of our investment thesis as well as like who's delivering value to the world is Northstar? Because if you're delivering value to the world than individuals with value will pay, will pay for that. And whether it's in dollars and get swept into Bitcoin or whether it's in Bitcoin on ramps, a great example. PS People play us in Bitcoin because funny enough, one of the only things that are more valuable than Bitcoin is how you custody it. Because if you don't custody the right way, you might might not hold it very long. So yeah, I mean, a lot of this makes sense. It's just unfortunate because it's going to take a while to play out. Yeah, using leverage has been the prudent thing to do for these PE funds from, you know, 2009, 2010 to right up till COVID. And they're just going to, and they've gotten a lot of value that way. And so they think that it's just going to go on forever. But unfortunately that's, that's not quite as valuable as just like actually investing in real companies that are delivering value. But yeah, it's going to take a long time. Yeah. And then the other, the other link I wanted to share related to this is sort of on a a similar but different track and and what this chart is showing is revenue growth as increasingly the key value creation lever for PE generally speaking. So it's saying effectively like what was always sort of a game of of leverage and cutting costs isn't really working. And so a lot of the exits that we've seen over the past few years are shifting a little bit more towards just top line revenue growth and margin expansion as opposed to levering up a business cutting costs. And I think this is an indicative of a few things, but you know, effectively what what has worked is starting to not work. And so this is a sign of, of people in PE land having to, to ship their strategy a little bit and focus a little bit more on actually, you know, getting a company to produce value. I think the other take away from this could be just the onset of, of AI, like maybe you need less leverage and, and the cost cutting is, is also still a component there, but you're just leveraging deflationary tools in a little bit more of an efficient way and just driving revenues a little bit faster than you otherwise would have. But any any thoughts on this one? Well, this ties into a little bit of the the first conversation around. We never tie back directly when we see housing, but specifically medical care and education, because a lot of these things are government subsidized and you see them hit the highest amount of inflation and administration costs in the bureaucracy that sits in these organizations. And it ties back to like private equity and I don't know, the trade, you know, maybe Liam can probably articulate it better, but you hear that talking about where private equity will buy like the medical facilities or or hospitals, and then they'll strip them of like IP or any of the goods, like sell them off and then they'll sell the shell to whatever, you know, other subsidiary that's part of the government or government subsidized. Point being is you've seen this like extraction via the system and people taking advantage of it. It's not good or wrong bad. It's just it is the incentive model of the system. And that's where you get these like insane, you know, healthcare costs and all that. But point being is like what happens when more of the government goes in and and you know, it has these misaligned incentives because the money can it doesn't have the discernment of allocation that a general private market investor would have. You're just going to end up with more distort distorted outcomes. Going back to the first point is what we're seeing here. We have any thoughts on this one? I think it's, it's difficult to tell just from this chart, but yeah, I think it's a little bit of a shift in terms of the types of businesses that they're really focused on as well as just the the proliferation of additional. These strategies are very well known and of just like, you know, you need to cut your costs as much as possible. All of these companies are looking to do that prior to prior to being sold to private equity companies and so they can get the best valuation possible. And many of these people don't haven't actually run a business in the past. And so they can go in and say you can cut costs, but they don't actually know how to do that. No, in a very reasonable way in order to drive drive potential returns and margin expansion for these businesses. Yeah. Paul said. Hi, guys. Thanks for listening. I hope you're enjoying the pod. Just wanted to give a quick word from on ramp and early riders. You're probably familiar with our venture fund we operate and we will be having some very exciting meeting of the minds over the next few months in Nashville around a few events happening at the Bitcoin Park, as well as in Dallas around the North American Blockchain Summit. We'll be having one-on-one meetings, private roundtable sessions discussing the status of the market, some of the exciting investments that we haven't publicly announced, as well as other ways for individuals to get more involved with everything we're building across the ecosystem. If you're interested in learning more, you can reach out to us directly, you can book time or you can just subscribe to our research. We're going to be publishing a lot of these dates as well as ways to get in touch via the Early Writers newsletter. You can be at our Early Writers Calm. We're always excited to hear from individuals. We have some of the most sophisticated listeners and clients and investors and early writers. And I really mean that we're working on kind of the bleeding edges of this space. And so it usually takes individuals that have had to think deeply and follow the space for a while to kind of pick up what we're putting down. But we love hearing from you folks and also hearing about ideas or ways to get involved. There's no shortage of really amazing talent out there trying to kind of either take a one step out of the traditional space and figure out what their next move is. And we love hearing from individuals like that because we're working on a lot of things and it's really our job between the Guild network on ramp and early writers and some of our other portfolio companies to figure out how to help there. So I'd encourage you to reach out if it's not this week, please keep it in mind as you navigate the space. We'd love to speak with you. All right, have a great rest of your week. And we'll be back with the last trade with a very big guest that we're super excited about. I don't know if Jackson will like that. I share it here. So if you want to know, tag him on Twitter and maybe he'll share it on Twitter. I don't want to steal his Thunder. All right, have a great week. Maybe switching gears a little bit, there are a few sort of just deals or announcements that we can take this in any way. I did want to share this one. I thought it was relatively interesting. Sofi becomes the first US bank to use Bitcoin Lightning for remittances. This is 3 partnership with Light Spark, which is David Marcus's Lightning service provider company. Pretty notable just in the sense of a, you know, a tradition, more traditional fintech seeing the vision of, of building on Bitcoin as opposed to all these other various block chains. And, and interesting in the sense that that is where the large sort of largest focus is in the stablecoin sphere. And you would expect Sofi to be thinking through use cases like that, but they've decided to partner with Light Spark on this one. So any thoughts on this? I think we talked about it before. I just don't see how this is going to at least today matter. I think like I think lights work has the A16Z ties. They're super not only well capitalized, well connected. And so I think the relationship similar to David Mark as being a PayPal like you can go to a sofa, you can tell them a story. Lightning been sold forever as a story, whether it's for payments and Blackhawk and all these things that never transpired with different firms and very similar here. And to your point, like the outcome we talked about before is things the same here. It's like you just put it on the easiest database, which is a stablepoint database, and then you transfer it over like that. Like thinking about the level of education and permissions that you have to move over. I just don't see it happening today. Now, obviously 510 years from now and for whatever reasons from interoperability to, you know, governance and, and potential, you know better from a censorship perspective and privacy. People would do this stuff on Lightning, but I don't see why they would. And then the amount of liquidity to make it material would happen there versus just on a public blockchain that is running some of these stable points? Yeah, it's another announcement of something that's coming in the future from a very large company. And sometimes these dealer don't actually end up happening on the timelines that they expected. And they, if you scroll up, there's something about implementing university money addresses too, which I don't know what that means and seems like it's overly complicated versus just using, using the typical address schema. So we'll see if this ends up happening. But if you're not already, if neither side really wants Bitcoin, it's a little bit of overcomplicating things in my view. Yeah, the fascinating thing with all of this, and this is happening across the world and we get a glimpse of it and means we're in is everyone is focused on these things that are sexy by whatever standards. And you know, the blockchain was this like in 2017 and 18 and STO's, and now it's real world assets. And then there's like payments and remittances. And it's not to say there's not innovation there, but it's just a hard thing for people to wrap their head around and then sell that. You want to be able to like house and custody this asset, store it and then when your client bases, I think we should transition because I think Brian's been a little bit like, you know, worried. I'm not going to go hard on him. I just want to like he's like all this like stuff is not news. The news is like it's all coin season, all coin season. If you can pull up that I love Brian. Brian's going to keep pillar of on RIP. So I'm not I don't want to, you know, sour relationships. I'm not going to go so hard on his calls around that. We're never going to see, you know, alts and Bitcoin dominance go below whatever. That's not where I'm going to go with this. Just want to want him to know that where I do want to go with it is ultimately this is going to get crazy. We've been saying, I've personally been saying it. This title says Bitcoin well wakes up after 7 years, rotates $270 million worth of eat. I don't know if this is true or not. I don't I have no reason to believe it's not true because in the same way people and large holders of public equities and other assets can manipulate markets. It's the same way where large holders, I think this is tied into some of the sell off from the past 24 hours that the person you know, potentially was manipulating the market to be able to buy back lower in the same format that there's large holders that play both sides of the market and that as the Bitcoin, you can go back and forth between all coins of Bitcoin, but the other, we don't have to pull them up, but I just had them in this channel. If you give me one second, I want to like rattle off just how wild what's what's about to happen and what's coming is So just, you know, read them off real quick. So the past, let's call it 48 business, 48 hours past two business days, Grayscale and Bitwise filed their amendments for the XRPETF. There's a former bit main exact launching AB and B Treasury targeting a billion dollar raise. Grayscale also files an S1 with the SEC to convert it's Avalanche trust to an AVAX ETF. Galaxy Jump and Multicoin seek a billion dollars to create a Solana treasury Vanek proposes JIT Sol ETF. Hold that one of your thoughts because I'll come back to that or maybe we'll we'll go back to like to that JIT Sol one very similar to I think it's like hyper liquid. So, so I can't help but bring up a little bit of this is where the fundamental discrepancy with between Brian and I were is that like a only 1% of the market roughly knows about any of this stuff. So it was kind of like insane to me to believe that 99% of the people were going to just bypass the noise was 1. 2 is the institutions love this stuff in the same way the individuals where they like testbed for just all again, the mental gymnastics around yield generation and all these crazy things. So they're going to parlay that into these frameworks of ETFs and public treasury companies that will generate passive yield by these other insane strategies that blew the market up in 2022. And and then the last part is crypto, including Bitcoin has been insanely historic, historically been insanely hard to get spot possession of, right? Like this is just pure why the ETF has had such large demand. And even like MicroStrategy, because if you really think about it, for anybody listening here, might be pretty simple to go log into an exchange and buy some Bitcoin, maybe figure out why you're going to custody it. For the majority of people, that's a very hard proposition. Like it's the way to either use the mental model. If you were to go set up a gambling account, you're going to go set up some like third party weird place that you're going to end up at. You have to move your dollar from your bank account. Hopefully they land over there. You have to buy the underline that is a magic Internet being and then you have to move it off into some other third party if you're going to like actually secure it the right way. That is not like easy. So these ETS provided that point of walking through that is when you think about hyper liquid. I don't even know what hyper liquid is, but and O'Brien does and he shared it multiple times. It's my understanding that this hyper liquid token is a very hard to find on any exchange. So if somebody's going to give you a, what they're called Dats now, I guess digital asset treasury company to give you hyper liquid exposure, they're going to generate yield. Think about the amount of people in your old networks that are going to love that thing. So anyway, all coin season is here. It's going to run rampant. And I'm sorry, Brian. No need to apologize. I'm I'm willing to admit I may have been overly optimistic about the understanding of Bitcoin being different than cryptic. And it's not even that. It's not even really the distinction. It's just the greed and animal spirits that still exist. And people see a way to make money pump these things. And you might be right. We might just be at the at the sort of beginning gates of that. And if I'm being honest about it, I think 50% dominance is now in question. And you think I will pull up BCCD? Just. No, I just want just for reference of where it was, it was around 65, it's now at 58. My call has always been 50%. There's a lot of resistance there. We'll see what happens. I will also point out though that the ETH BTC ratio chart while that's been spiking over the past month or two, it's still off its highs of 21. So like in Bitcoin terms, Ethereum hasn't made a new all time high. I would say alt alt season's really here. If and when that does happen, like if if we see this ratio continue to go up above its its previous all time highs, then I would then I would say 50% is is in jeopardy. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I I mean, this is the hard part about where we've gone back and forth and this is like the thing we want versus the thing that's going to happen are fundamentally just different. But the IT reminded me of it. And this is just timely you of all people should have been on to this trade and how it was going to play out because a year ago today we are in the SALT conference in Wyoming and really great from a just like. Boondoggle perspective. Boondoggle from an environment, right like Jackson Hole and late August is just amazing. But remember just the amount of you mean you sat there, you wrote a whole piece on the noise that was there and that was the Canary in the coal mine and you can imagine. So it happened again this past year, heard great things from again the environment, but very similar when it comes to the environment from, you know, the signal to noise ratio around digital assets and all the things associated. So yeah, this is just a sadly sad state we're at. It's also the alpha in the market on just holding spot and and you know businesses that will occur it, but yeah, yeah. I mean, the other thing I would say is like probably should have known better. Once Trump coin happened and it became very apparent that the administration was not just leaning into Bitcoin, they were leaning into everything and that gave the air cover for everything. So I do think of that that's been a factor as well, probably would have happened regardless. But all of these Dats and broader institutional interest in all these other assets, I think is also a reflection of just the administration's stance. It's that plus it's also just the E players in the industry who for better or worse are looked at as like the largest in in the suits like the bit Wises etc that are going into and leading this Galaxy. Tom Lee, I think Brian Armstrong tweeted Belaji Coin over the weekend which had like $3000 in market cap or something. To that degree, all these people are not just interested in Bitcoin and the market perceives them as to be the best educated. So until that changes, we're we're probably going to to see all season continue. Yeah, maybe you can click into the other link because that ties directly into the rent extraction. Which one? There's a rent extraction link I think it's titled. It was right below the. Last. Got it. Yeah, the so this reminds me of this conversation that Liam just kicked off around the suits and and whether it's Brian, Brian Armstrong or Tom Lee, very similar to the gas lighting in the government buying a company that looked at anything any way positive in the same way that most individuals that were coming from Triadfi and even probably some listening, we think we're either Luddite. So there's some innovation happening here, but we've had 15 years to show empirically that there is no, there's no objective value being delivered by any of these block chains. And even the stablecoin aspect, if they really wanted to from a consortium level can adopt this. The banks compete with each other, but we all believe it's going to end up back there at some consortium level because even at the stablecoin level, you can seize and censor all the transactions. Now they do obviously offer innovation from like rails, but the European Union has known to have like great kind of like connectivity when it comes to banking. Like it's not as innovative to be able to send, you know, dollars from a bank domain. And so we've seen this play out. And so these tokens that are filling the Dats and the ETFs have no underlying value. Nobody's delivered delivered them. And at least from their architecture, we could talk about multiple layers on Bitcoin and where you would, you know, have some of the stuff derived from. But point being is so it's been rumored the past couple days that I think it was the block and then block works that 21 shares so it looks like 21 shares ETF would invest in crypto Etps, features and equities. Active management let's us move beyond simple exposure and deliver strategies that adapt in real time to practically evolving market head of U.S. business X BlackRock. And if you Scroll down, it says the firm's looking to launch these two will be there will be a lot of crypto exposure for investors to choose from in the coming months between funds and equities. Tons of experimenting from ETF issuers to see where demand is. I doubt it will last. So it shows a 2X long DOGE ETF, a 2X long SUV ETF. There's discussions around Bitcoin volatility or concentration might be a problem for four O 1K. So now you're going to have mutual funds that have a basket of crypto currencies. We've seen Bitwise in particular for years have bask in the top ten. The fun part about talking about this is like there's actually receipts out there where Bitwise have launched multiple things like there was the metaverse ETF with multi coin that they scrubbed. You can still Google and find it online, but they scrubbed it from like their website. Any like, you know, the last thing, because these things, they're just kind of it's rent extraction. It's the ability to. Take individuals come into the space they're looking for, quote UN quote alpha, and then you sell on products, you take your crazy management fee, including in these DAT structures, and ultimately people get left holding a bag of effectively 0 or close to 0. And yeah, we're just going to see this at a much greater scale now that the plumbing is all opened up into these Dats. Yeah, this is insane. This is crazy. There's a bull market for noise like this is going to hurt a lot of people. 2X long dose, 2X long suey. To your point, there's no underlying value in any of these things. And you're layering on not only leverage, but counterparty risk, execution risk, all these things to something that doesn't even have fundamental value to begin with. So this is not great to see, a little disappointing. But to your point, this is kind of inevitable. And this is, this is, this is the world we live in now. So feel. Like we feel like we broke Brian. We're dead it. May take a long time but eventually this market structure will break. People don't really look for a basket of diversified precious metals. People know that gold is the best, and just like that they will know that Bitcoin is the best and only digital asset. There may or may not be a place for other of these that are significantly smaller than Bitcoin, but it's going to take a very, very long time to get there. Yeah, yeah, we mentioned Wyoming. I know Michael doesn't like when I read Tea leaves, but there were some heavily discussed words from Jerome Powell last week in Wyoming effectively with some people are looking at him abandoning the 2% inflation target. Now I think that that was a little overblown. But again, all of these are just words. They don't really matter in the in the grand scheme of things. But if we are to look at what he said, it is a bit of a departure in the sense that they're not really focused on inflation anymore. And there's various reasons for that, but they basically know they can't get it to their target of 2%. So they're sort of tacitly abandoning that target and instead focusing on a weakening labor market as a rationale to cut rates. Now, the reality baked into all of this is that they have to cut rates regardless of their excuse for it, because the interest expense on the debt is over a trillion dollars right now with rates where they are. So they have to bring down rates. They have to print money, and this is all just words. But as Macroscope points out here, lots of debate around the meeting last week. He's saying they didn't technically abandon it, but they are signaling basically their intent to abandon it at some point because they can't get it to 2%. And then also just shifting the focus from inflation to the labor market. Another tweet to share here from Cobia C. This is sort of what I was alluding to. They were going to blame the weak labor market. So they're just going to forget about CPI, which has been above 2% for 53 straight months. And so naturally this is pro risk assets, pro Bitcoin, pro gold, all of that. And it, it should be seen as as a bit of a pivot. They're shifting, you know, Powell also said shifting the balance of risks may warrant adjusting our policy stance. So basically that is foretelling a a likely September rate cut. Again, blaming the labor market as opposed to inflation which they can't get back down to their target. Maybe one other notable thing from this was just the market reaction to it. So right after these comments were released, you see gold spike and the dollar collapse. Thoughts on this Michael? I know you hate the Fed and tea leaves, but I thought I thought it was important. Yeah. I mean, I don't necessarily hate the Fed. I think, I think it's just all gas lighting. We talked about it a week or two weeks ago about the Warren Buffett like the short term noises, noise. I think the key thing I took from there is I thought for for weeks if not months, they were consistently saying that the job market was great. And we know the job market and inflation aren't great. It just it doesn't take a rocket scientist to go and see what it costs for anything or to see friends and family either not having jobs or being stuck. There's all these terms about like job hugging where people are just fearful of leaving. There's crazy numbers on like the amount of movement of jobs and like it's like a 50 year low because of there's just another, there's no other opportunities where people understand that there's very little limited opportunities. So yeah, I think this all like aligns right. It's just like, what's the the flavor of the the next Fed meeting on, you know, how do you spin the the narrative? I think the reality is we're just going to be in a much higher inflation than 2%. So now you have to start to figure out like what is that mix and goes into it to kind of get people familiar with how we're going to be in persistently higher inflation, at least in those terms. Whatever number they give us, you're going to be able to probably add 10% confidently and know that that's what real inflation is. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying the podcast and it wasn't too doom and gloom. Really just try to share what's currently happening in the markets, how we see it. The altcoin craze is something that sadly will persist. But I believe if you're listening to this podcast, you probably understand that and think deeply about Bitcoin custody. And just a quick word from on ramp. I'm sure a lot of listeners know of the different offerings that we have, whether it's, you know, multi institution custody, the ability for our our trade desk lending and inheritance, and then the dynasty trust, which we are really excited about. We have no shortage of exciting things coming out this fall. Really I think industry shaking things that across the the landscape we have a lot that we've been working on. The one that I just want to go a little deeper on is Guardian that we announced today and specifically the proprietary and I don't even want to call it proprietary, but the 3FA3FA, we're really excited about that because ultimately it's something that suffers the Internet connection from the movement of your Bitcoin. So whether it is, you know, video verification, multiple institutions verifying that 2FA logic time, withdrawals, those are all put in place to protect client assets. But at the end of the day, they leverage the Internet connection specifically from a subjective view, how do you interact with humans in the logic? 3FA takes that a step further and really relies on public private key cryptography, specifically around Bitcoin wallets and the movement of certain UTX OS for a certain client specific PIN. This is something I've been thinking about deeply. It might be overkill for somebody with, call it, 1 to $10 million, even though it's still open for them. But for clients that we work with that have 10s, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, it's something that I think they're going to be really excited about. Because ultimately it takes it a step further and leverages either a hardware device that we would ship them or another way that they've generated private and public key. So if you want to learn more about that, you can look at the blog post or you can feel free to book a consultation if you want to talk with me directly. Again, Michael at honor@bitcoin.com and hope you enjoy the rest of the show. Yeah, I, I actually read it a little bit differently. I thought that they were moving away from the 2% inflation over time that they authored back in the pandemic and moving back towards the target of just 2% inflation, meaning that they might be a little bit more restrictive than than we had thought. I think that Powell probably wants to protect his legacy of, you know, running too hot on inflation. Then if he's not able to really tame it, then he likely will want to. He wants to fix it. Like he doesn't want to be the guy who had super hot inflation over his term. And but he also doesn't really want to crash the labor market. Labor market to your point, like the the job switching because that a record low new hires is like very very low both below pre pandemic trends. So they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. Yeah, that's all. Well said. Maybe one other just headline, Liam, I think you'd share this one, but the Philippines thinking about a strategic Bitcoin reserve, I don't know the likelihood of this. Yeah, I think, but. It's extremely low, but if you pull up the link there, it's interesting to see all of the different data points that they mentioned. Like in Central America, El Salvador already adopted Bitcoin as legal tender and began to purchase and hold and reserve. Brazil introduced sovereign strategic Bitcoin Reserve in the European Union. Switzerland is now considering it alongside gold in Germany. The former finance ministers suggested that they produce reliance on USD and consider Bitcoin as a way forward. Poland considering Bitcoin reserve. Hong Kong has advocated for it too. The Malaysian government has started to consider the use of this the in Russia, they've begun to use Bitcoin and other Western Digital currencies for international transactions as part of the strategy to bypass Western sanctions and reduce reliance on USD. And so this in itself is I doubt that the this Philippine one gets passed or or that this is really meaningful in itself. But just taking a look at this kind of laid out and how much the Overton window is shifted from the past two years, I think is just interesting to see. And regardless if they do it or not, I think that there are going to be a couple countries that do it over the next five years or so, which will just continue to move that window over even more. So just like we've seen Harvard allocate to the Bitcoin ETFs, we're we're just going to see it go incrementally this way. And it's interesting to see how they laid it all out like this and how far we've come. Yeah, I agree in a in a sea of noise as well as pessimism around the status of, you know, just kind of like misallocation a capital, the notion of a congressman in the Philippines drafting this bill and then all the other anecdotes Liam shared is very positive for that like kind of domino just next domino to fall, whether it's Philippines or somewhere else. And then it really ties back to the notion of where we shared if like the next, call it, 18 months, you see the sovereign adoption and accumulation step in, things get really interesting and accelerated versus like the traditional markets, Our traditional Bitcoin markets when it comes to havings and and just cycles. I don't think they go away, but I think they take a completely different form if you have sovereigns globally that have access to what's effectively unlimited dollars and also energy to be mining step into the market. So do you think it's a positive direction independent of like the likelihood of, you know, the Philippines accumulating Bitcoin? Yeah. No tool said some signal in a in a sea of noise. Whether or not this gets passed, it's the it's the over Overton window continuing to shift with respect to to Bitcoin as a reserve asset that you would want on your balance sheet as a sovereign. Michael, there was one other stable coin related length that you'd shared from layer 0 labs. Is this the Wyoming stable coin? What was the take away from this? Yeah. So I think it's I love Wyoming and the people behind this, you know them consider them friends. I think it's it's cool to see Wyoming lead in digital assets. To my understanding, this is the first stable coin that's been launched on so many block chains, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche. To my understand, it's not necessarily stablecoin. It's a stable token because of it being issued not by bank, but by the soccer state of Wyoming. The thing that what stood out to me, and I don't mean to be pessimistic about this, but I was thinking about it last week independent of the Wyoming launch, was that the notion of the CBD CS are here, they're just not called CBD CS. Because where this all goes is we're going to have, I think very few people that pay attention to digital assets and Bitcoin would say that we're not going to go to a digital world for for dollars in the movement of dollars. And they naturally have to become interoperable because it's just inefficient for them not to. So however that manifests again, directionally don't know. It's the same way we talked about the yield being generated on stable coins. We don't know how it's going to happen, but we just know market forces will determine it or require it. And similar to like Coinbase doing whatever they're doing in their arbitrage from like marketing dollars to pay people back for using it. So it's not yield by a circle point being is everyone's friendly until the draconian measures come in and it goes back to the state private public partnership. We saw this happen again during COVID. It's not about being conspiratorial. It's just the reality of when you have government, you know, sanctions and forces and policy for the greater good, whatever the greater good is marketed at the current time, you will naturally be able to now effectively like just halt any movement of capital. And so you're starting to see this. And again, it's marketed, it's spun as a positive where what's the recent knowledge around like HSAS and Maha and like, OK, so you're going to get like your HSA and then maybe that's going to be digitized, but you can't like buy, you know, Coca-Cola or sugary stuff, right? Well, like, that's how it starts. But ultimately, you're basically saying with a click of a button, you can programmatically determine what people are going to buy or not buy. So again, it's going to look like a positive for the industry. It's going to be. I think it's positive for Bitcoin because more capital is going to come in because, you know, you have a digital dollar and you can just eat. It's more interoperable with BTC. But I can't help but see this is just kind of like, you know, not going to play out very well for a lot of people long term. Yeah. I would agree. I think that Tether and Circle are pretty much just like half a step removed as well-being overseen by Congress as well. It's pretty much just all the same thing and using we've already started to see this with choke point 1.0 with the restriction on guns, payday loans, etcetera and de banking of those types of businesses. The the flow of funds and and tracking that and as well as just the then permitting what you can and can't buy will will probably continue to heat up moving forward. Yeah, it's a slippery slope for sure. They'll be positioned as innovative and necessary, but there are some seriously negative potential externalities from all this continuing to flow this direction. Let me switch gears a little bit here to some research that early riders put out last week. Michael, I'm going to pull up your tweet 1st and maybe you can speak to sort of high level what we're trying to accomplish this with this report and then I'll pull up the report. Yeah, I think at the core, I've been hesitant to say this, but I feel a lot more confident we'll still be polarizing as we're so early to Bitcoin. We hadn't even figured out custody yet. The tweet, I know Bill Ackman gets a lot of crap on Bitcoin Twitter, but it's a really apartment quote that he had which says institutions cannot self custody without severe regulatory issues. And that's just one issue, not just regulatory. Most of individuals would prefer not to self custody. Crypto will remain a sport for hobbyists until this is fixed. And so this is something that we've been talking about, thinking about really the notion of how do you get access to Bitcoin without the trade-offs, you know, a third party custodian and all the other layers of intermediation between an ETF or Bitcoin or a treasury company. But then also again, the reality is, yes, it's very easy for anyone on the planet Earth to put a 10 bucks or $1000 into twelve boards or a hardware device, But it gets really hard for somebody to put all of their wealth. And I think that's the big gap that most people have been missing is again, a Bitcoin speculative asset and people want to play around. It's very easy to put a little bit of percentage in any of the existing custody solutions, whether it's a hardware device, collaborative custody, an ETF, Coinbase, etcetera, etcetera. But if you're going to think about Bitcoin permeating in everyone's lives and every aspect of society in the same way that the Internet did, you have to bring standardization across the board. And so this piece breaks it down and it references different formats like the SSL of Bitcoin time back to encryption and how if you if anybody old enough remembers, you know, or your parents trying to buy anything online, they would never put their credit card information online. And now that's looked at is standard via encryption. That's based online Linux very example very similar similar an open standard for building blocks on top of different, you know, software hardware. Very nice piece of the early writers team put out and I think it's worth a read to kind of see how this goes. The iPhone is something that gets loosely thrown around a lot iPhone moment, but there's good examples of once you have, you know, a product that kind of collapses and disintermediates a lot of either physical or software into like one unique kind of construct, you can start to really innovate and bring things. And so an iphone's a great example where GPS being included in your pocket now started to allow it for you to hail an Uber, a car that, you know, historically taxi cabs were like 110th or one 100th of the amount of demand for for rides because you didn't have the technology to manage. And that's just a small example. So I think very, very good read and then also gives a good lens of not only how we look at the market, but the opportunity that we invest in. For if we're so early that custody hadn't been figured out, then there's a wide open opportunity to bring standardization and then bring a lot more, a lot more effectively capital and users into Bitcoin. And that goes from individuals all the way to whether it's credit unions, credit funds that are allocating to the space that need a more redundant resilient architecture when you're doing Bitcoin back lending to insurance products. So I highly encourage the rate if anybody's interested. Yeah, go ahead, Lynn. I was just going to say, building off that, yeah, I mean, like we're we're still in such early days. I couldn't help thinking of Steve Jobs initially trying to sell computers, not not actually built to retailers and allowing them to build it themselves. And they and he didn't even understand that that's not necessarily what they wanted. Forcing people or not not quite forcing people, but just like telling people to if they want Bitcoin exposure to become hobbyists and figure out how to figure out how to manage all their wealth in hardware devices or however they want to custody their funds is just not something that is super interesting to a lot of people. And there's always specialization because that is just how the world works. It's just allows people to be more efficient with whatever they're doing. And so rather than just trying to convince everybody to be a hobbyist when they're. Potentially going to lose significant funds if they don't manage it correctly or, you know, keep them out of the market is just probably not how the entire world is going to work moving forward. So yeah, I would highly encourage people to to read this. It's kind of just goes over the historical arcs of other technology and how this is kind of applying to Bitcoin today, yeah. Really great piece, I think would stood out to me or you know, at a very high level. It does a great job sort of walking through, you know, what has traditionally happened with emergent technologies. They go through these various phases where you know, initially the hobbyist phase, there's a ton of friction embedded in using the new technology. So whether that was PCs, some of the earliest cell phones or Internet protocols, there was a, there was a stage there where it was very difficult to use. There was a lot of friction, a lot of learning. And effectively, that's where we are with Bitcoin custody because we have to your point, you know, people for the last 15 years have figured out self custody because they knew the alternative was probably suboptimal, IE trusting a single custodian. So they were forced into this niche hobbyist endeavour of figuring out how to secure their their you know, in a lot of instances, the majority of their net worth be a cryptographic material hardware devices. And there really hasn't been a way outside of single custodians to broaden the access reduce the frictions associated withholding this asset in a risk mitigated way. And so in our view, you know, multi institution custody pioneer by honor. It really is that break breakthrough for Bitcoin for Bitcoin custody in the sense that it's it distributes the counterparty risk, it's risk mitigated sort of at at the base layer, at the protocol layer using Bitcoin native multi sig. But importantly, it abstracts away the friction of the end user in terms of securing key material themselves. And so it's this really elegant infrastructure approach that I think opens opens the door to just a lot more innovation on top of that standard, but also just more adoption of the asset because it's simpler, reduce friction for someone to onboard only underlying in a risk mitigated way where they don't have to do it themselves and be that niche hobbyist. So this this walks through the various examples at at length. And the other thing I would point out too, to just note here is like the stakes are different when we're talking about Bitcoin custody relative to these other technologies that emerge and went through these phases in the sense that, you know, if you were early edition of some cell phone craps out doesn't work or, you know, you can't log onto the Internet for whatever reason, you're not losing your assets, you're not losing your net worth. So there's, there's obviously negatives and it was clunky to use these different technologies, but Bitcoin and Bitcoin custody is a different, it's a different level of, of stakes and, and what's at risk for things going wrong. And so that's why I would say this sort of infrastructure breakthrough is even more important than some of these ones that we're making parallels or analogs to in the sense that the stakes are just much higher. This is people's money. In many cases, it's, you know, a large percentage of their net worth, and they can't afford to have those frictions that ultimately could end up in a catastrophic permanent loss. And so it is just different in that sense. But go ahead, Mike. Yeah, it's well said and I think it ties. Back to there's a lot of historical precedences and influences to where we're at and why it hasn't been done as simply because again, we're so early. But when you look back at again, there are multiple disciplines. But when you look back at the, the mainframe computers and what had to go into effectively like a mathematician or an account, somebody that's managing accounting to code up with the logic would be, there's great references on where you'd have to like not only build the logic, but then you would hand it off to somebody that would go and like punch these cards that almost look like like folders or like an envelope that would be plastic. And you'd have to like get the holes in the correct way. And if you messed it up and there were stacks of them, depending on how complicated the formula was. And then you'd have to put that into the mainframe computer. It's like there's a lot of like precedents to look at. Well, OK, that was used by certain individuals, but overtime you have to democratize that access. But then on the complete other side of it, when you think about Goldsmiths and the notion of like gold monetizing in real time, the reason we're a lot of this stuff is still taboo and why there's a lot of opportunity for us is because in Bitcoins 1st 15 years, the logical way to custody, it wasn't self custody, A, because this didn't exist, but really B, the asset was so small. So there wasn't really the significant losses that you had at stake. Now that a Bitcoin is 112,000 or whatever it is. And then what you need also when you think about like dynasty trust or insurance or these other products and services that are out there. So for 15 years, it was the thing to do is self custody because third party custody, ultimately you couldn't trust it. Still make the case. You still can't because it's just code. It's just pick one private keys. They're just data. And at the end of the day, all data will eventually get leaked in some capacity. We've seen this historically. And so when you look at the historical presidents, it's very similar to gold where a bunch of times people would leave their gold buried in their backyard or, or in their on their land. They give it up to the church or a third party family member. But all those things don't have, you know, congruence, accountability. They miss a lot of the natural functions for, for coordinating economic activity. And that's where the Goldsmiths were introduced. And then we obviously went away from the Goldsmith as you created notes and you know, the different, you know, claims on it, but very similar here where it's just thought of as a second order. Like custody has been figured out because we figured out how to hold, you know, the private keys on a hardware device or trust a third party ETF when for 15 years it's been proven that it hasn't worked. Because we know that for everyone person that gets kidnapped, hacked, loses their money in a wildfire or all the things associated, there's a hundred others that haven't come forward for a number of reasons. And then again, the last big blow up was only three years ago. And that's where the market completely delevered because of the lack of transparency and all the things associated with centralized custody, let alone hacks. And so it's just something that the, the world, the market works in a very 2D fashion. And so it's like what all that we've been given is what we assume will be there. But that's the definition of like, what's obvious is obviously wrong. And so I think this piece does a good job of it. But we'll, we'll continue to do more because when you look back, you know, history doesn't, it often rhymes. And when you look at computers, when you look at banking, like the notion that we're all going to just be our own bank, it's not even technically that it's impossible because it is for every, you know, 8 billion humans to hold their own Utxos. It's actually from a socio economic perspective. Nobody wants to be their own bank. Even the people that scream the loudest about self custody, I can guarantee they go to sleep at night not feeling the greatest that all their wealth is held on 12 words. That God forbid they get hit by a bus and they haven't set up the total protocol for their family to get it. And again, it's not an either or thing is the beauty. It's the same thing as money is. If we don't hold all of our cash in the bank, like you may take some home, you may have some in a rainy day fund, you may have these different options. It's just explaining the standardized process for the vast majority of wealth will end up going down this trajectory. Yeah, very well said. So we'll link to that in the show notes. Check out that report in a related item, Just thinking through custody risks, there was a report from last week of a social engineering attack. We've been seeing these increasingly over the past really almost two years now, I feel like have we've been seeing increased. News items other than social. Engineering or physical attacks in the crypto space so this happened to be a social engineering attack, a victim losing almost 100 million in Bitcoin. They were using what it seems like is a some some hardware wallet that then there was an attacker posing as a support agent for said hardware wallet, getting them to effectively unveil a certain amount of their cryptographic materials or passwords or logins to the point where they could then siphon funds. And so this is, you know, a continuation of trend that we've seen. You know, on one hand, multi institution custody, broadly speaking, defends against these. But I want to pull up a announcement from on ramp. Just this morning we went live with what we call on ramp Guardian, which is basically even further protection. So going beyond the custody layer and thinking through how do you defend against basically the unauthorized movement of your Bitcoin? And so sort of the first defense against that is just superior trust, minimize custody through multi institution. But basically wrapping around that various elements of basically just, you know, the ability to slow down the process, the ability to put in enhance identity checks, time delays, velocity limits and enhance fraud detection as well. So using AI to combat AI deepfakes potentially and really just doing everything in our power to add an additional layer of security around what we believe is is sort of best in class custody. But Michael, anything to add on on on Ramp Guardian? Yeah, I think the spoofing. Stuff. Randomly I had a dream about spoofing. I was thinking about pitching Sailor if if yeah, we won't go far sailors actions and intent, but sailor pitching him on MIC. And it was this notion of spoofing because what Brian was alluding to, there's a lot of already, you know, value and assurances and security with multi institution 1 specifically is around the notion of even if a key signer was somehow spoofed by multiple versions, that would take, you know, different levels of an organization's coordination. The beauty of multi sig is that because it's interoperable and because the signatures happen in a segregated fashion, one address or one signing is it completely independent from the second one. So you can't manipulate the second signer to sign up a malicious transaction if it wasn't authenticated via the person. But that so there's a lot there with video verification to go into multi institution. But to take it a step further, given not only the physical attacks that have been occurring, but also the social engineering that is increased, there's a number of levels from whether it's a lot of folks concerned with AI and the deep fake protection to leverage AI to combat AI by using the ability to tell if somebody is actually there or not. It's a real human. The withdrawal delays have been something that clients have been asking and using already because depending on markets. And also this goes back to just market understanding that if you know that you're an honoring client and it's going to take either days, if not weeks, if not longer to move the assets, you're automatically because there's certain aspects of this that doesn't matter, gets thrown out a lot. Well, if somebody has a gun to somebody's head, they are just going to tell them to move the money. It's like it doesn't work like that in banking wire in the same way doesn't work with on ramp, like there is a SLA in process independent of what's happening. And that's also why you may want some form of self custody because you may want to give them something. But then layered on top of that, there's obviously the insurance, there's freezes in case there's the ability for somebody to get access to your account. But then there is a new F3FA protocol which effectively severs the Internet connection to objectively prove that it is you with a certain amount of Satoshi's wanting to move from one wall to another. That's limited to private clients for now, but we can talk more about it if you ever want to book a consultation. But I'm personally really excited for that because we have clients that hold, you know, quarter billion plus in assets and significant wealth is stored with us. And there's a notion of at the end of the day, a lot of things end up subjective, whether it's passwords or can be manipulated, spoof video verification, that certain holders will want to sever that Internet connection and have a objective opportunity to show via the blockchain. And Satoshi's, you know, UTX has moved that. It is then verifiably proving that they are moving this amount of assets. And if they don't, then then the account naturally will go into a freeze. Really excited about Guardian and just really adding to the value. Again, this is similar to insurance and the other products we've launched. There's no additional cost for this, which is something that is important for us, that the idea is we're not just a custodian, we're a private bank for bitcoiners. And you want to be able to deliver as much value as possible, whether it's trust planning, estate planning, inheritance, or the just ability for your friends and family and bad actors to know that you can't just take somebody's assets independent if you show up to their house or not. Yep, very well said. We'll link to that in the show notes as well if you want to learn more or reach out to any one of us one other before we wrap. I know we're we're up on time, but there was one other headline related to all of this related to custody risk, particularly at the corporate Bitcoin treasury level. Michael, you'd share this one. Corporate Bitcoin treasuries could raise credit risks. Morningstar says regulatory uncertainty, volatility and liquidity challenges could all elevate the credit risk profile firms adopting a crypto treasury strategy. So basically my understanding of this was Morningstar and other credit rating agencies are looking at a lot of these Bitcoin treasury companies and Dats and saying, you know, effectively calling out custody as a really important risk to consider. Something that we've talked a lot about on their show seems to be impacting or at least, you know, entering the mind of credit agencies looking at these these companies. Yeah. I think this ties back to everything we talked about with the standardization. If you're a corporate rating agency, you're looking at a public equity, whether it's a, let's forget about digital asset treasury company, just a traditional market public listed company that holds a significant amount of BTC in its balance sheet. Figma is a great example. It's in Coinbase's ETF, but if nothing happens to Coinbase, what part of the credit rating starts to take a hit? If Coinbase is holding trillions of dollars and there's no form of insurance that will provide, you know, insurance for that, let alone, well, what's the strategy like? Is it in cold storage? Is a verifiable chain? Are they lending against it, doing other things? Now, these might not seem like a big deal today, but as the asset appreciates because we're again only at 112 K, so two 2 1/2 trillion dollar market cap. But what happens at 5 trillion, 10 trillion? And these risks come back because they will like it's again, we've never, we're in the Wild West. We've never had a digital bearer asset worth this amount of capital online. There will just be increase in volatility when it comes to counterparty risk. Like I can hang my head on that. And if that's true, then there will naturally need to be standardization, not only the the ratings of who's holding it, but then how are they holding it? How is it verifiable? And insurance is one of my favorite ones to bring up because I don't think I'm very confident insurance in this industry has not been solved yet and simply because most insurance companies are insolvent. We all know this. And so you should never rely on your custody arrangement because it's insured. Sure, we offer insurance and I look it as a cherry on top, but the best form of insurance and I can explain why ours is different. But at the end of the day, the best form of insurance is the way cryptographic materials held. And so I'm convinced that over time you'll be able to create these. We've talked to firms about these these mutuals, these insurance products where you can hold them in multi institution custody. It'll be natural for institutions to participate in this that already have Bitcoin exposure because they've already had to underwrite the, you know, notion of multi institution for their own holdings. That'll propagate over into them participating into some of these mutuals. And now you can start to really develop robust Bitcoin denominated insurance markets, which will naturally also fill into this credit rating. So I think we're just very early, but it's an important thing that's been brought up that the credit problem is a, or the credit rating problem will only increase as a, as a natural point of friction as the market grows 100%. I think it's a definitely a. Positive signal that you know, at least we're talking about this stuff more. I think for a while the sort of concentration risk, particularly as it relates to Coinbase being the custodian of nine out of the 11 ETFs is something that's just generally not spoken about. Like everyone recognizes it as a really important risk, but it's really not talked about. And so the rating agencies talking about this in the context of treasury companies, I think just blows through to all elements of custody and and people recognizing that, you know, these proxy exposures come with real risks. And so you have to you have to consider those as you're making your allocation to the asset. How do you actually want to hold it? Do you want to do it through a proxy where there's layers of counterparty risk and potential credit related insolvencies at the underlying level or do you want a more direct exposure where you have greater assurances of your ownership? Yeah. And the the crazy part is that you can see. It playing out this way from a very simplistic view of it's already kind of happening where nobody ever gets fired to go into Coinbase and maybe a little bit of Fidelity. So if you just look at this, you just need one treasury company or one large custodian to mess up and then you're back. So like it can be again, like the treasury company is an easier example because it can be a small amount of BTC, but at a public treasury company that's well known as influencers, whatever. And then now everyone starts to just think which they already should have of like, how are they custody and are they trying to generate yield from it? But if you take it a step further, well, that naturally starts to move the market to where it's already going of like, OK, well it needs to go at Coinbase because of XY and Z reason. But that in itself is it's this natural paradox of the more successful Coinbase is, the more likely they are to fail. And a from a just pure first principle perspective, this is how gold fell. Because ultimately, if you end up with a centralized asset, you end up with too many claims on it and then you can't actually audit it. You end up in a whole slew of other problems. But the other side of it is just the ROI starts to grow for the honeypot for that asset. And so there's just multiple forces that will like naturally push people in this direction. And it ties back to the war Buffettism of the whole notion of the definition of like risk management is, you know, just like it's such a great, like it's a crude example, but he references if you're going to get off him a billion dollars, but he has to play Russian roulette. But here's the kicker. It's like 1000 bullets. You can make up whatever number of or not bullets, but 1000 spins in the chamber, but you have one bullet. Well, you would never take like no rational person would take that chance because if you click the wrong, you know, trigger once you pull the trigger, once wrong, you're out of the game. And it's very similar with custody. It just takes one time and you lose all the money. And so this is just, again, we're so early and they're still so small allocations that nobody talks or discusses this. But as the price rises, the allocation becomes greater and then the confidence and conviction of the education becomes greater. That this is just the rational outcome for market participants. Paul said. All right, boys. We got through a lot. I think we got through all the links, got through the reports. We'll put those in the in the show notes. Anything else before we wrap? No, I think we're going to be out on the road. Hosting events. So if anybody's interested in meeting the guys or the team US one-on-one, we're going to be hosting some private dinners and some other round table events, please reach out either. You could shoot all of our names at earlyriders.com or schedule time with the on ramp team and and let them know that you're interested in joining. There'll be some stuff in Nashville next month and then Dallas in October, but I think it's going to be a busy 18 months. So, you know, reach out. We always want to connect. And then I think we'll be taking better logs of kind of who's in certain markets as we're around the the country and actually outside of the country. Try to set up more round tables and things where we can all connect with listeners and clients that are, you know, partnering with us. Sounds good. All right, boys. See you next, guys. Thanks, guys. 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 onrampbitcoin.com Contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.
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