Altcoin Confusion, Political Tokens, and the Hard-Money Answer

[Music] It all comes down to computers communicating. >> The information superighway 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 okay, 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 roll of gun. The one thing that's missing but that will soon be developed is a reliable ecash. Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another episode of Final Settlement. It was a fun podcast covering uh all things that have happened the past, you know, week and a half in the digital asset space. Positives around Bitcoin adoption along with Altcoin Mania coming back. Um quick word and exciting announcement. You'll be one of the first to hear it. We just launched on Guardian. really excited to get this out because we've heard from the market all over the board as it comes to security with um 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 talk to clients a lot about. Um, 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 um, as the market starts to realize you don't want hundreds of millions of dollars or even tens of millions of dollars in your possession. And so what honor and guardian does is effectively uh brings out withdrawal delays, deep fake protection against AI, instant freeze functionality, and then obviously our Lloyds of London insurance. And then for private clients, it goes even deeper. really thinking through um 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 move and then a real proprietary uh 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 and if you're already a client you could just um you know activate it via the web platform and then if you're looking to To learn more, please feel free to book a consultation or shoot me a note. Always happy to hear from folks. Michael at honorbitcoin.com. Now, on to the rest of the show. >> All righty, gentlemen. Welcome back to another episode of Final Settlement. Today is Tuesday, September 2nd. We're recording after Labor Day. We had a little uh little break. I know Liam was having some fun at the beach or or doing something, but uh kind of a slow week. Not a ton of um deals necessarily, but uh a good list of topics nevertheless. Uh how are we doing, boys? >> We offici we're officially in uh Sentember. It's the the precursor to to uh what is it? October. Is that how it goes? >> October. Yeah, October is loading. Um September typically a uh a weak month for for markets generally, but also Bitcoin specifically. just looking at the monthlies um going back historically uh but coming off a bit of a softer month so who knows who knows what'll happen here in the near term um not really the focus of the show uh necessarily but where we're going to start today is um you know there was I'm not going to name names but there there were some calls for peak clown world many years ago that uh were were undeniably false clown world has continued to perpetuate here and and we get new examples uh seemingly every every week and the latest is um some news from the administration. I'm just trying to find the uh the link here, but we're going to put GDP on the blockchain, fellas. And uh not just any blockchain, we're going to put it across nine different blockchains. Um, and for no real reason other than to say the word blockchain in a government context seems to be the main takeaway for me at least. Um, I have some other thoughts, but maybe I'll I'll kick it to you guys as I find this link. Um, GDP on the blockchain. There's just a lot of noise here. A lot of people are just listening to the self-proclaimed experts on where the market's going, how they can really provide value, why this is interesting, just but they're it's pretty much like a um like most of crypto unfortunately is just trying to solve a problem that doesn't really necessarily exist. The data is out for everybody to see automatically. It's not going to come any faster on the blockchain or um anything like that. So, it doesn't necessarily make a ton of sense to me, but it's just another data point that we're seeing that there's a lot of confusion on what to actually do that provides value and there's a lot of interest in the industry, but people just don't necessarily know what they're doing or or why um why some things are valuable and and some things aren't. Um so unfortunately this is just another instance of people being confused um kind of pigeon holed into one idea that doesn't necessarily make sense but there are a few people that are really pushing this idea. So uh just a lot of a lot of money to be lost and destroyed and just confused confused out there as they kind of enter this industry. Yeah, I mean I um I haven't looked into this because it's it's crazy, but I'd be curious, Brian, I feel like you probably gone into I'd be I want to share one thing and then I'm just curious like what the idea is behind it um or why, but where I heard some of the kind of like crypto, you know, thought leaders were talking about u like pricing oracles and, you know, GDP to be able to u and other data to be able to speculate on via the thing I did want to bring up because I don't think it's on list is just a lot of the prediction markets that are coming. Um, and this notion of there's just been an insane amount of investment and they're starting to merge. I think there's some like tax u kind of arbitragees you can play in prediction markets versus traditional sports gambling. Um, the reason why I've always historically I know like prediction markets sound sexy and having like Bitcoin as the kind of, you know, mechanism and very similar to like BitMX and nitrogen sports. If you if you've been around for a while, you've seen these like on-ramps that are and off-ramps with Bitcoin are pretty cool in the sense you can't really be censored or have your your bank account shut off if you win money. The prediction markets personally don't hold a lot of interest from a investment perspective and whatever. It's just more I think people will make a lot of money. It's just that it's the same thing as gambling. Um, and you see a lot of this kind of uh confluence with just traditional markets and and social with gambling because of I think the version of like nihilism that we're in and people trying to make it big and not having a lot of things to do. We see this with sports betting in particular the past few years. But that's been the angle that I think they've come up with. I'm curious like if that's part of what this is is like as we go to a more of an onchain future and you'll be able to like get this data publicly available um or if there's a different angle outside of the prediction stuff. >> Yeah, I mean that's an interesting angle. I don't think that that is what they've touted as the rationale for doing this. I mean that would be a little odd if they were saying like yeah we need government data on the blockchain so that we can have more accurate prediction markets so that people can bet on GDP. So, I don't I don't think that that's the the reason. I think the reason really stems more from what Liam said in terms of like just the confusion around like, well, why do you need a blockchain? Like, what are blockchains actually good for? And it it speaks to this this whole notion of of confusion in the altcoin and broader crypto space when when people are sort of sitting around and trying to understand what is the utility, why do people need these all these different blockchains for things and and as we've said on the show in the past, I think like if you're being generous, the the product market fit, the one thing that has made sense is stable coins. What hasn't made sense is like the need for data to be on a public blockchain necessarily. Like I don't think we've seen the real use case that makes that um a necessity or adds value in any way. And in the case of like government data specifically, like it definitely doesn't make sense because like there's always going to be there's a centralized issuer of the information. It's similar to the stablecoin thing where like yes, you can have um a digital dollar running on these quote unquote decentralized rails, but at the end of the day, the underlying is centralized. And so it's it's the same thing with like governmentissued data in that sense in that it's coming from a centralized issuer. Putting it on a blockchain doesn't make it any more true than it otherwise would be. Um and then there's the whole other issue of like these these data points get revised regularly. So, if you're going to be publishing it on what is supposed to be an immutable blockchain, like that kind of doesn't even make any sense because you're probably going to have to revise these numbers and then there's um you know tracking issues, etc. And so, like it just doesn't make sense in in basically any way you look at it. And I don't even know if they have like a legitimate rationalization for it other than Trump is the crypto president so obviously we have to put our data on blockchains. I really don't think there's any like next level thinking on the on the rationale here other than they want to say the word blockchain. >> Yeah, I would agree. There's one aspect that I can kind of see the rationale behind it which is that the data is immutable and can't be changed in the future but this uh data is so it's distributed so widely that everybody knows that if there's going to be a revision to the jobs numbers GDP print etc. Um there like people can understand where the old information was and old data points and so it does it's uh it's another problem just or uh yeah it's another just use case looking for a problem that doesn't really exist at all. >> Yeah. No, that's exactly right. And um this next link, this next headline that Liam, you you'd shared is is somewhat related and just in terms of the continued confusion around all coins, crypto assets and particularly this administration and in this case Trump media which is doing a CRO token uh treasury plan 6.4 billion um based on an equity line of credit. Any further thoughts on this one? This is a a digital asset treasury company, the DATs, as they've become known. Um, and CRO is the native token of the Kronos blockchain. I'm not even entirely familiar in terms of what that does or purports to do. Um, but yeah, they're going to buy a billion of CRO tokens, it sounds like. >> Yeah, this happened. Uh, World token launched now essentially makes up most of the Trump family assets this week. It's just there's a lot of confusion. Everybody's starting to get interested in digital assets more broadly as Bitcoin hits new all-time highs again and not everybody can be an expert in everything. And so the trusted experts at Coinbase or uh all those other firms >> Crypto.com >> Yeah, exactly. Just the the largest players in the space are necessarily just pushing everybody else farther out on the risk curve and just because that's where they make more of their trading revenues. it's uh not necessarily the most profitable thing in the world in order to just tell people to DCA into Bitcoin and just hold it, probably never sell it. Uh so most people are are pushed out further and further onto the risk curve just because that's the incentive of these web 3 crypto companies. And so there's just going to be a ton of money that's lost over time. Everybody thinks that this is how not not everybody, but there will be many new entrance to the industry that are trying to navigate what the difference is between Bitcoin and everything else. And um unfortunately, it's just going to cause a lot of money to be lost. Gavin Newsome said earlier today that he's going to launch his own token in uh in response to Trump going out there. It's just there's there's a real lack of opportunity or real lack of understanding for what the asset really is and there's a a really big opportunity to just be focused on Bitcoin in in a world of noise. >> Yeah, that's an interesting I didn't know Newsome um was getting involved in the the token game. Um the there was an interesting quote about this wall I don't even know why Wi-Fi the Liberty financial coin about um you know they're really going to burn like digital assets to the ground if unless like Vance stays in power meaning like how deep and how heavy um you know Trump and others have gone into this space. I think like his son's on the board of almost seems like every Bitcoin kind of treasury company. Um, one thing we talked about like a year, not a year ago, but close to a year ago was the notion of Trump getting so close to all these companies and was that like is that a new precedent or was that already established and we just didn't look at it because we weren't looking at this industry uh or the particular industry that the the previous like administration was involved in. And I'm starting to believe like everyone's always we know like the Pelosi and other um you know politicians and their exposure and there's like the bot that tracks their trading. Um but I'm starting to believe that it's a it's like a feature not a bug to these people's allocations. Meaning they're allocating and then announcing it because they see how it's the it's the vibes for the investment for retail to get involved. So if Trump's behind it, um, you know, and these other players, we see like the Salana stuff getting big, VC's behind, you start to like get the retail markets interested and and it's almost like its own version of fundamentals on why people would get exposure. And so I think it's like part of this whole plan is Trump like and their team get around it because he's a [ __ ] president. So there's a lot of money to be made. Um, and it also goes back to like again if you have to get uh a thought leader or a community around it, you should really secondguess, you know, your investment. This it reminds me of some of the public the publicly traded Bitcoin companies and how they have to get an influencer to pump it or they're just kind of like there's no differentiation. Um, so again, nothing surprising here. Uh, it's come up a lot. We'll name names on who asked who's going to deploy $5 billion to tokens, but uh, you know, we're seeing it here. we are starting to see some signs that uh the craziness could go on for longer than any of us would like or could have possibly forecasted. Um maybe shifting gears slightly. Um but another Trump related story is uh and this happened a little over a week ago, but worth worth referencing in the context of some other developments um more on the Fed policy side, but Trump says he's removing Fed Governor Lisa Cook. um citing allegations of mortgage fraud. Um and this is, you know, uh this has to be placed in in the broader context of Trump's repeated and persistent pressure on the Fed in general. Um both on Jerome Powell and the governors that surround him and their unwillingness basically to cut rates when Trump says he wants rates to be cut. Um now Pal's comments most recently in Jackson Hole indicate that he is thinking about cutting rates at the September meeting. Um all of this is is really minutia in the grand scheme of the broader story here though which is um Liam you had brought various links related to this but basically fiat currency and and particularly the dollar just losing their reserve status and why this is all related is because inflation is sticky. It's at 3% and we know that that's that's misrepresented. It's it's much higher than that if you're buying goods and services in everyday life. Um, so inflation's not going anywhere. And the Fed has basically said, "We're going to we're going to let the economy run hot. We're going to let inflation run h. We're going to focus on the labor market. We're going to cut rates we're going to cut rates into all-time highs in the equity markets, all-time highs in basically all asset classes, um, outside of bonds and areas of real estate. but we're going to cut rates into that environment because of the weak labor market and and all of that is to say that they're going to rationalize cutting rates and printing money however they can. But the reality is the appetite for US government debt and really just fiat denominated debt um is waning as you start to see central banks around the around the world accumulate gold um diversify away from US treasuries. This is all part of a broader story. Um and while you could look at the various headlines, you know, Trump pressuring the Fed, um you know, are we going to cut in September, that's kind of all noise to this broader picture of the US really, you know, attempt, you know, beginning to lose its reserve status, um and countries around the world, central banks around the world, um really going no bid on on US government debt. And and what are the implications of that? The implications are you need to own hard hard assets, whether that's gold or Bitcoin. Um, and so Liam, I'll kick it to you maybe to pull up some other thoughts and uh some other tweets related to this. >> Yeah, we're essentially just watching a slow motion train wreck happen. And it's it's very difficult to to watch so many people on the sideline. But I mean everything that you're seeing of interest rates going in to be near zero and and bonds being a bull market for since the 1970s to 2021 is reversing um the I know you guys had a great episode with the Groman last week touching on the reserve status and uh of the US dollar and how there is both political aspects to it of like the US seizing all the uh Russian treasur ies when they invaded Ukraine. And then understanding that the US dollar is is no longer going to be the world reserve currency. Brian, you just pulled up a chart that shows uh global international reserves where gold fell from it looks about 70% in 1954 to um just about 10% by the mid um 2010s with the US dollar make uh making up pretty much all of the um remaining reserves up to about 50% of global international currency reserves. that is waning significantly especially since uh 2010 just because of the counterparty risk notion that the US dollar needs to print its way out of the existing crisis um sovereign going back to the you know hard money like gold and uh obviously we know Bitcoin is pretty much goldest things um we're just going to we're looking at a slow motion train wreck and it's going to be important to position yourself knowing that this uh this trend is going to reverse over the next 40 years, but also understand that trading Bitcoin or going leverage long Bitcoin uh with that thesis can result in a lot of losses. And just like we touched on earlier with uh Trump Media, CRO uh you know, token treasury, world, etc. There are going to be a lot of people who try to get exposure early and end up with losses just because they don't necessarily understand how this whole thesis is necessarily going to play out. Just like people who are super early to into the internet um in the 1990s but not necessarily understanding the full trend that um that was going to happen and how adoption was going to take place. >> Yeah. I think like the two takeaways working backwards on what you said is the digital assets are just like the existing market personified. Um so when you think about the volatility and the cycles I think of like business cycles but accelerated with the four roughly fouryear trend. Um, and so you see the the craziness and lack of fundamentals and what you're saying in World Thigh. I think of it as like lack of fundamentals in uh what was it? Uh, Open Store and these other companies that like people are buying to store their wealth in and speculating on that or ultimately like ending up in real um nominally maybe making some money sometimes, but in real terms they're losing. The other side of it is uh part of the Fed governor. I didn't follow a lot of it, but I was listening to some of again just like thought leaders in the trad space and political commentary and I think it's bringing to light the lack of uh the fact that like these markets and politics aren't um neutral or they're incentivized by uh they're not bipartisan effectively. So that the Fed governor, you know, they're supposed to be in their view. And I think the general consensus has been like these entities um don't favor any one political party over another when it's coming to light that they do and they they're inherently do because they were elected whatever time frame. And so it starts to bring to light just the fact that you need a neutral uh money that cannot be politicized and especially that is devoid of counterparty risk depending on you know where it's held and who likes you at the current time. So I think a lot of these things are just starting with like going to create a confluence of the understanding of why you would want gold or bitcoin in this kind of new world. >> Yeah, that that's accurate. And I would say the nuance as it relates specifically to the Fed is that while these people are appointed, they are appointed by politicians. So there's an indirect level of um these people being voted into the seat. So yes, naturally you'd you'd you'd likely see um some partisan elements developing in in a what is supposed to be sort of separate from the government or at least independent um institution like the Fed. And so I think you're right that we're, you know, sort of lifting that veil, that sort of shroud of of independence is is being pierced pretty significantly here. And it speaks to exactly what you described, which is you you need to assess the counterparties of any assets that you hold and ensure that you aren't going to be um debased out of your wealth. And that and that is what has been happening with the dollar. But because of the sort of shroud of independence, the shroud of um you know 2% won't kill you type of thinking, really Keynesian type thinking, like they've basically been able to get away get away with it for for some amount of time. And central banks around the world are are waking up to this. And so this is the chart that we have on the screen now. um global international reserves. You can see sort of you know it it was predominantly gold for a long time and then you know as as the dollar became what we we know it is over the past 50 to 70 years it it you know ate away at people using gold for for international reserves and you're starting to see gold spike back up there. Um, another chart which I'll pull up here, um, says, "This chart illustrating how central bank direct holdings of gold now exceed those of US treasuries for the first time in some 30 years." Um, so this is just a different version really of that prior chart, but just isolating gold in US treasuries. And you can see uh on this chart, gold uh as a percentage of foreign reserves has now exceeded US treasuries for the first time in about 30 years. Um, so the the writing is kind of on the wall for this stuff in in terms of just the the trajectory, the monetary order of things and and you know, we did touch on a lot of this with Luke Groman on on last week's uh last trade pod. So definitely check that out. But it really goes back to, you know, this idea of inside money versus outside money. And you know, Zilton Posar from Credit Swiss started talking about this in 22 as we froze uh Russia's treasuries. And that was that was the big wakeup call, I think, to most central banks around the world. And we're just beginning to really see the follow through that on that over the course of the past three years really of um central banks diversifying away from US treasuries and and stockpiling gold effectively. Um but that was really the starting gun that said hey um these assets which are you know presumed to be risk-free and that is the reason and the basis that they are such a large percentage of international reserves well they're not actually risk- free and they can be seized at a moment's notice if you do something we don't say or like and so that really changed the playing field for what is money what is it what what what do you hold as a reserve? Um, and the shift that's now occurring is towards things that can't be controlled by a government that doesn't like you effectively. And so that is gold and Bitcoin increasingly. Um, and so yeah, while we're still in the early stages, I do think that this is becoming much more I guess like less of a taboo and and much more in the zeitgeist that like you can talk about these things. You can talk about gold's performance uh relative to the S&P. if you put the S&P in gold terms, um you know, what has it done? Or in in this case, which we have on the screen now, this is a tweet from Groman saying the home price index um in dollars versus gold versus Bitcoin. Um so yeah, if you were storing your value in in real estate, >> um you thought you were doing good nomally. Yeah, I think it's it's still obviously like very early in this kind of portfolio of 6040 and it's it is it's not it's not that it's not taboo because in a traditional you know we have a Kyper pod coming and there's other large institutions that are still very hesitant to talk about anything outside of the 6040 and that's where you hear Bitcoin being in the you know small digit or crypto in a small digit percentage of a portfolio I think um so it's still early in the sense like Gold has so much more room to run. Today's interesting that I believe gold and Bitcoin are are green where the U S&P 500's red. Gold's like hitting it way past it alltime high at this point. Um and there's the notion and we're part of this podcast and discussing investment opportunities that the market hasn't woken up to if everything's the derivative of the dollar which is being debased then it influences all other investments um and the allocation you know the allocation of capital where you start to see well where do you actually park your money so from a store of value and outperforming any one uh asset, but then just re-underwriting all these other uh vehicles because they were invested on whether it was interest rates or just the amount of uh capital that's being deployed like the notion. It's still very early in that world, but people are going to start to question everything that they've invested in and based on obviously the incentives of how is invested, but also the benchmark if inflation continues to run rapid. So it's like coming at it from both sides that I think um it's just fascinating for anybody listening here. I think it's pretty straightforward that gold and bitcoin will increasingly become uh staples or even larger and larger positions of individuals portfolio and just basically base money but then that drastically impacts how uh allocations will be made and then also um the type of businesses that will end up like going out of business and then also who will thrive in this kind of world. Yeah, well said. And especially early on as there this isn't necessarily recognized by the rest of the market or very broadly there's a really unique opportunity where you can start to run circles around competitors in whichever industry you you're in whether it's a small family business um being able to save your um save your earnings and cash flow in Bitcoin versus uh you know in dollars you'll you'll be able to outperform your competitors significantly. ly over time just because you'll be able to reinvest that money in significantly better ways um and in ways that your competitors just can't really and and don't have the chance to do. As well as just the fact that um because you're saving your money so efficiently and and it's growing over time, you'll be more costconscious with every single investment decision and expense that you have. Yeah, this chart really highlights kind of the the state of like where we are and uh we're looking at Groman posted the returns of gold for the past I guess 50 years as compared to the um S&P 500 and it looks like Bitcoin's you know chart against the dollar or the S&P 500 and I think this really ties into similarly where nobody talks about this or looks at it in the same way nobody talks about what inflation really is that nobody's incentive advice to do it for for a number of reasons, but we know sovereigns are doing it. We know the most sophisticated investors are allocating to hard assets. Um, and to Liam's point, it's just it's really binary. If you protect yourself, then you'll be able to thrive. And if you don't protect yourself, um, well, good luck. And so, just being early to this, whether it's from a personal portfolio or if you have sound business, um, from like entrepreneurs all the way to, you know, product market fit, and then you also have a better form of money. you're not suffering from inflation, margin compression, all the things associated specifically like even the degradation of client services in the product. There's no shortage of of things I think anybody listening has felt whether they call a customer service or they go and they try to buy food like at a restaurant and the type of whether it's the um the uh hospitality or just the underlying everything suffers when you have the wrong money because you're consistently being debased. So it's harder to make ends meet. But if you basically have a better form of capital B, you have a capital base that is um sound, then you're in this new world, you're just going to crush it. And anybody listening that has had a material of uh their wealth held in Bitcoin, well, they've seen friends, family, and the layoffs and all the things associated, it's pretty again binary. Um, so it's positive to see that people like Groman and others are looking at it and it's going to get more pronounced as inflation continues to pick up. The sad part is we're still very early and so that's where you see the gambling, the the trading apps, um, Trumpcoin and the allocations there as well as to the traditional equity market. AI is the greatest example. I think AI probably has second and third order effects we haven't fully understood yet on why it's like a it's almost like a a sponge for all this excess liquidity that came in at a very opportune time in 2021 as interest rates were rising and people needed money to go somewhere. Um but yeah, it's it's all this is all going to like just become more and more uh apparent because people are going to have to like just view it or see it and recognize it. >> Yeah, agree with all that. I think um you know the reality is most people are not incentivized to see the reality of what's on the chart here and and why I say that is I caught up with an old colleague from private banking days a few months ago and it was a wide-ranging discussion just catching up talking about Bitcoin talking about sort of the investable landscape in general and towards the end of the conversation I I made some remark of you gold has outperformed the S&P over I think I said five or 10 years, but this this obviously goes back to 1971. Um, but the look on my former colleague's face was just like that can't be true. Like there's no way like we've never had any exposure to gold. The reason we don't own it is because it doesn't outperform the S&P. Like it. So there's an actual grappling with reality that needs to come with a lot of this stuff. And while we are early days, it's it's charts like this that I think really are startling to someone who hasn't thought about money, hasn't thought about the impacts of inflation over, you know, compounded over 50 years. Um, but it's stuff like this that I think needs to just get more and more into the zeicist to have people have their their wakeup call moment. Another example um is this tweet here uh from David Summers basically saying you know gold at $35,000 an ounce is gold 100 times better than it was in 1971 and the the obvious answer is no but the the parallel I'll draw to this is like often when talking about monetary premiums or um just scarcity of of various asset classes you can you can analogize this to to real estate So, you know, the the house that some boomer bought 40 years ago, is the house today 20 to 50 times is it 20 to 50 times better of a house? No, of course not. Um the the value, the appreciation comes from the debasement of the denominator. Um the debasement of the currency in which it's priced. And it it's just these simple things that for for us on the inside looking at this all day every day for years, like it's intuitive. we understand these examples, but I think it's stuff like this that I think actually gets people to get out of their mold, get, you know, question their priors on the actual imp impacts of 2 to 3% inflation over 50 years. Like, well, what does that actually do to your purchasing power? Um, the the things that are appreciating aren't necessarily better. Gold isn't 100 times better. The house isn't 100 times better. The currency is is continually debased. And the currency is weaker. And and that is I think the realization that we need to have and people need to wake up to. But it it's for whatever reason it's very difficult for people to have that realization and question their entire life and their priors and their particularly if they're in the trady world and and operating with um you know the S&P 500 as their benchmark and and haven't really thought about hard assets. >> Yeah, we've been seeing more and more of this. Um, it was last week was formidable because we talked with Groman, talked with Kyper from Fidelity and then I think there was another conversation and there's a bunch of things that are happening in the back end why nobody talks about what Brian just alluded to. Um, and really career risk underpins a lot of it and the career risk stems from uh the natural debasement post 71. A lot of people didn't necessarily like what products were they going to go into in gold and if gold was going to be base. Um how do you derisk like gold is in this recent kind of like upswing given that there's a lot of macro tailwinds from sovereigns and just base money I think over time changing and being realized and the market not appreciating. But um when you looked at it probably in smaller time frames the S&P did outperform gold and that's where people stored and bonds you know were crushing it. So people allocated. So the and nobody was going to park 100% of their wealth in gold and put it in their house or like they they really unless you're going to go get a sovereign bull, you know, bullying depository and there's very few in North America. And it reminds me very similarly of Bitcoin where we talk about this thing of like Bitcoin is a trade but realistically most people aren't holding anywhere near 50% let alone 100%. Because how do you custody the underlying? What are you going to do? Are you going to go spin up, you know, uh buy a hardware device and get 12 words and put all your wealth in there? Like most people don't do that. aren't going to do that. The ETFs have shown, you know, that there's an easier way, but that's also still a small percentage. And so, um, it's why we get excited about the multi-institution aspect because you can give people the asurances, um, that the the asset won't evaporate the next day and they can start to allocate more material amounts, but there's still the existing inertia that the market has formed over 50 plus years to create these other structured products that theoretically should have helped you um, in real terms, and they're not anymore. but nobody can talk about them because this is where you see like the Linds and the Lukes. They're really sound individuals that came from traditional investment research, but they're independent. So, they're able to talk about these themes. And so, this all ties back to the investment opportunities that you're just going to see uh it's kind of the reason behind the name early writers is it's going to be the early riders and it's innovators dilemma 101. The incumbents won't be able to win build the right products because they have uh legacy forces. But then the other side um to call out was the the mortgage stuff because the mortgage situation is increasingly um becoming a problem. I think last week Trump announced um the potential or they're going to they call it um what is it executive order for like national emergency for the housing crisis. And I don't even know what that means other than like they can bypass Congress. And I think this has been rumored that they're going to be able to give some people uh liquidity out of their homes in some respect. And then there was a really good uh Misus Institute post that came out this past week referencing um the status of the market is just completely inorganic when you have sellers not willing to park from their houses because they're h they're fixated on this this amount that their house was worth. But with interest rates rising, it's priced out net new buyers to come in, but they can't get rid of it. So they just taken it off the shelf while you have net new buyers not able to do anything. And um so you have this like basically like almost just Frankenstein level of an economy, but then we've been talking about behind the scenes and you've seen where there's new companies popping up that will let people access liquidity in uh real estate which majority of Americans hold as their primary, you know, wealth mechanism. They're storing a value they've been acrewing for for decades to tap into this finite scarce asset. And with conservative leverage, I think like these are the different examples where there's a a crazy world, but you can actually um capitalize on it, whether it's taking advantage of the products for your personal wealth or investing um that will help in kind of this transition period. But net net, yeah, like there's just everything broken across the markets. Hi guys, thanks for listening. I hope you're enjoying the pod. Uh just wanted to give a quick word uh from On-Ramp and Early Riders. You're probably familiar with um our venture fund. we operate and we will be having um some very exciting um meeting of the minds over the next few months in Nashville around a few events happening um 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 um 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. Um you can book time or you can just subscribe to our research. We're going to be uh publishing a lot of these dates as well as ways to get in touch via um the early writers newsletter. You can be at early riders.com. We're always excited to hear from individuals. Um, we have some of the most sophisticated listeners and clients and investors in early riders. 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. Um, and also hearing about ideas or ways to get involved. There's no shortage of really amazing talent out there trying to kind of uh 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 riders 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 uh the last trade with a very big guest uh 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. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying the podcast and uh it wasn't too doom and gloom. Uh 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. Um, but I believe if you're listening to this podcast, you probably understand that and um, think deeply about Bitcoin custody. And just a quick word from Onramp. Um, 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, inheritance, um, and then the dynasty trust, which we are really excited about. We have no shortage of exciting things coming out this fall. really uh I think industry shaking things 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 uh Guardian that we announced today and specifically the proprietary uh and I don't even want to call it proprietary but the 3FA. Um 3FA we're really excited about that because ultimately it's something that severers the internet connection uh from the movement of your Bitcoin. So whether it is you know video verification, multiple institutions verifying that 2FA logic uh time withdrawals those are all put in place to protect client assets. But at the end of the day they leverage uh 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 uh relies on public public private key cryptography specifically around Bitcoin wallets and the movement of certain UTXOs for a certain client specific PIN. This is something I've been thinking about deeply. Um it might be overkill for somebody with call it 1 to10 million even though it's still open for them. But for clients that we work with that have tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, this is 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 generated a private and public key. Um, 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@honorbitcoin.com. And uh, hope you enjoy the rest of the show. Well said. Um, switching gears slightly. Um, Michael, I think you brought this one. This was pretty startling to me. There are now more ETFs in the US than there are individual stocks. What was uh what was your takeaway from this? Yeah, I mean I think this goes back to everything else we've been saying is just there is um inherent financialization in you know the world and and how everyone thinks about products and services. Um and it's pretty crazy where ETFs are inherently centralizing in the same way like we've seen everything with um when the money spot is closest to few you naturally have centralization of all these goods and services whether it's the big tech companies the big banks um and also ETFs and around the trading of them and the vehicles that people get exposure but then the other side of it is that you have more um flavors of whether it's derivatives options uh and just including these stocks in these ETFs. So there's more of them. And it remind me very similar of the the treasury trade, the the DAT trade. It's that so there's, you know, X number of DATs that exist now when somebody can just buy the underlying and it's simply because people can make money on fees and that's what Wall Street makes money on. And um we just I guess the main theme is whatever we see, we can't really take it face value anymore. I think that's the thing. Everyone just assumes like the market is going through an insane um transition and it's going to look fundamentally different in the future than it does today and we're just generally not built to be either creative or or see the second and third how the changes happen. So we look at something like this and we hide under oh this is just normal or this is financial um progress. But the reality is this is just like in insanity that there's more u funds that house different stock products and the initial underlying companies that exist and you think about the time the amount of capital to build it the strategy to implement it and then does this actually perform more in real terms um than just holding underlying better base money. So that was my biggest takeaway is like this is the kind of screaming thing that when you see something like this, you look at everything else happening and it should also be put in that same vein of like Trump buying $5 billion of a worthless coin. It's just all kind of a lot of noise that's continually getting thrown at us. >> Yeah. What what I would add to that too is like it's sort of reflective of you know as you were saying are you going to outperform in in real terms definitely not but are you even going to outperform the benchmark is the question like with all of these ETFs and all these different funds and all these different active strategies the reality on the ground is that the vast majority of these strategies these funds don't even outperform the benchm mark that they're measuring themselves against, let alone uh you know, real terms or purchasing power terms. Um, and so it's reflective of this over financialization. Um, and also just like the business aspects of traditional finance. Like if you're an issuer or a fund manager and you can charge whatever fees you can can manage and it doesn't even really matter if you don't outperform the S&P, you're still going to have clients coming in the door. Like that is sort of the business angle of why this why this fact exists. um is people can make money from products and um you know it's a little nefarious in the sense that like to your point they're not going to outperform in real terms but they probably won't even outperform the S&P index because that index has become so concentrated and it's basically reflective of the you know performance of the seven largest companies uh in the country and so it's very difficult to outperform it's increasingly difficult to outperform that benchmark with a with an active strategy um so I guess not overly surprising but indicative of a lot of um what we know about Tradfy in general. >> Agreed. And this just makes me think about Ali Market or I think there are now 40 million different crypto tokens, etc. Um it's just people want to gamble. It's just human nature. Um so they're going to increasingly go out on the risk curve. They're just interested by it and that's just kind of what this is. It's it's culturally where we are today more than anything else. Yeah. And I I think the main thing here is like we'll be bound, you know, beating this drum till the end is it's like what's obvious is obviously wrong. And so if the world is telling you that you need a basket of cryptocurrencies, you need a basket of ETFs, you need a basket of stocks to maintain your wealth, maybe you should think there might be another way because that's what everyone's doing. And so that goes back to the gold and bitcoin play and the notion of having large percentage whether it's 20 30 50 100% in sound money doesn't necessarily you have to be all in in either direction. You can size it appropriately based on your education and risk tolerance especially if you're older and and you know we don't know where Bitcoin's draw downs will end up the cycle. Um but that's still a fundamentally better proposition. It should be more u coherent specifically to people looking for alpha. Like if you're an institutional manager, if you're a wealth advisor and you really care about your client, your return profile and your reputation, you should really like think about that because we know we just said the inertia for a lot of people aren't. Nobody's ever going to get fired for pushing the 6040. But if you're really, you know, thinking about, you know, what we're building on ramp or a bitcoin denominated fund, like you have to go back to the basics and you say, "Okay, I have this better store value." That's what I'll base everything to on and then I'll hold it until I see the right opportunities. The right opportunity should be few and and far between because that's the definition of an opportunity. They don't come all the time. And then um you place your bet and you size it appropriately. And so I think that this is just again a big opportunity for individuals that are just really looking for either confidence or conviction that have been looking at Bitcoin and are sitting on a few percentage points of their net worth to really look at the market and wonder like what are these assets going to do for me in real terms over the next two 10 years and then start to just like dig into well if these things keep coming out they're they're fundamentally to Liam's point earlier they're just put people further and further on the risk curve because it's just understood tood that the existing products aren't meeting investors needs when it comes to uh real versus nominal returns. And so you just see this further coming out and it's just like the oxygen we breathe the water we swim in. It's just so like part of everything that nobody can step back and ask like what am I doing here? Um, and again, it's slowly creeping in, but it's still insanely early, and there's too much forces that people will go down with like this and the dollar being tokenized and just losing uh for I think that's just the way it's going to go. >> Agreed. And you said an important point there too, which was um for those people who have singledigit percent of their net worth in the asset class getting more and more intrigued. I would also say, and Luke Groman said it well on the podcast, uh I think last week of just like if you're interested in it, just buy a very small amount. It's something that you're comfortable with. Uh you know, if it goes down a decent amount that you're you're not going to freak out and then that'll just force you to learn more about the entire asset, whether it's gold, Bitcoin, whatever else you're interested in. Um they'll just pay more attention when you have a little bit of skin in the game. Yeah, that was a very um salient point that he made on on that pod because I think for the average person in Tradfi, there's a ton of bias to opening their minds to Bitcoin. But a lot of that stems from just actually having zero allocation. And once you have one even small toe on the other side of having exposure, it forces you to at least think about it, track it, have it in the back of your mind. Um and and ultimately you end up learning more about it and becoming more convicted over time. But this was that was a strategy that you know I when I was in my private banking days would talk to various fund managers even just doing like public equity investing. They would do a similar thing where they would just have like a very small dimminimous allocation in their portfolio to a stock that they were just beginning to understand. Um and they didn't know enough about it. They they knew that they knew they needed to learn more, but they wanted to track it. And in order to do that, incentivize themselves to do it, they put a little tiny position in the portfolio in that name. Um, as just like a force forcing mechanism to to learn more about it effectively. Um, so super super salient insight from Luke on that because and I I hadn't realized this, but his first allocation was in like 2013. And so, you know, I don't think he sized into it until, you know, years after that. But it was that initial allocation in 2013 that caused him to continue going down the path, continue to learn about it. Um, and and being willing to question if he was initially wrong because even though he made the allocation in 2013, he still thought it was [ __ ] like at the time he thought it was [ __ ] He was just making the allocation to, you know, give him the out basically to learn more about it. >> Yeah. And I think the fascinating part about all of this is um you can it's very hard to make money on spot Bitcoin, you know, outside of exchange, maybe custody. Um, and so when you think about everyone touting whether it's, you know, traditional products or the crypto stuff is because you can create these different products and services to generate fees. Um, and so that's where you hear kind of like you don't hear this thematic around, you know, hard assets, protecting yourself, holding it. But then similarly, it's the same thing in the Bitcoin trade that's become it's like the reason where a lot of people in Bitcoin haven't historically been able to monetize their brands. And so outside of delivering, you know, value, creating newsletters, media companies, um starting a business, that's where this like DAT craze uh really stem from when you think about the playbook to get an influencer to go out and push these products. And so it's very similar like to look back and just look at the incentives of war where somebody because everyone has their own incentives. And it's not to say that the backing incentives right or wrong. It's just the reality of why you don't hear a lot of these the you know discussion specifically around like figuring out just how to buy Bitcoin instead of the you know an index or um also why you just buy Bitcoin versus a a treasury company. Um, so I think that because that's often comes up. It's like, well, I hear this, but am I hearing it from others? Like, well, what's the reason? Is it like because it's something that's fundamentally wrong in the logic or is it because there's just market forces that um are pushing people in a direction to push certain aspects. This is the same thing where the Radalio and other investors are, you know, will position small allocations when they're, you know, we we had this with Safeford and uh Valunis, I think Safford specifically, where they they're writing a book and they're talking about, you know, post ETF world and Bitcoin's ascension and they interviewed all these people and they all the people that they interviewed they asked like what's your allocation you would recommend and it was all like single digits and then when they asked their percentage in their personal portfolio it was like 20 to 50 plus percent. Um because again those people have jobs, those people have LPs and other investors that um you know they're incentivized to keep up with. And so I think there's just like I share this because I think a lot of times it's not enough to know the answer. It's enough to know why the answer is the answer because if you just like look at it's like ah it's too good to be true versus you know we look at well why Bitcoin and then you show all these charts you're like oh [ __ ] well like maybe it doesn't make sense. >> That's well said. Um, switching gears slightly here. Uh, Mike, you had brought this one. I'll be honest. I saw this headline. I was a little confused like what what is the reason for this? So, CFTC issues advisory opening path for Americans to trade on offshore exchanges like Binance and Bybit. Um, what was your take on this or or any insights from this, Mike? >> Yeah, there's a commission if you scroll down. Um, it's a four-letter. It's the FBO, which is the um division of or it's uh foreign Board of Trade. Um they're creating a process for non- US exchanges to be to get exposure to um you know, US citizens. What this reminded me of was just this notion of uh I always looked at like SPF and FTX and what happened in 21 as kind of like the dry run for where we're heading um into just, you know, we don't have fundamentally different market structure when it comes to custodians. We still trust them. There's still rehypothecation. We're still early innings of this bull run. And so it's not apparent yet, you know, Coinbase being an issue and all the other things we've talked about, but um it's the it's the example of SPF had to fail and those things had to happen for everything that we're seeing here layout. Whether it's the Genius Act, whether we're seeing Coinbase being kind of like blessed by the US government now as the de facto custodian for digital assets or this as an example of now you can trade uh uh overseas and in these offshore exchanges and derivatives when it was completely not allowed, illegal, everything we know um from BitMX to uh what is it? not FTX but uh the one that uh Darabit and so it just goes back to like once you have the infrastructure in place to monitor track create the right incentives you can go back and see this whether it's Binance now u I believe they're looking at getting their exposure in the US you have tether coming back to the US um you know to get their exposure for their um stable coin you have the ETFs as a preferred method you have digital asset Treasury companies now acrewing, right? These are all like wall gardens being able to be created. And this isn't for better or worse. This is just how you will see the state wrap its arms around this from a tax tracking and like mo perspective. And so I just thought it was interesting. It's like, oh, now we have this framework in place. Now we can get people trade. Uh, and it was before under like consumer protection and around, you know, derivatives and people losing their shirts. It's like, no, no, now we can tax it. Now we can control it. Similar with like gambling, right? Um, and so yeah, I just was fascinating. >> No, that I I appreciate you walking through that because that does make sense. Like, you know, part of it I think to me just signals like, you know, again, Trump wants to be the crypto president, so they're going to push all this stuff forward. But to your point, like they kind of needed to get their arms around it from a regulatory perspective first and then sort of give the green light everywhere else. So like a line in here that you know speaks to sort of the historical precedent from this was like many exchanges have avoided operating in the US because of uncertainty and risk of enforcement. And so now it's kind of just like green light. We're good with all this stuff. So now we're going to reopen um basically American traders to these these offshore venues um because it's now sort of within our within our grasp um to regulate it from our side. So that that I guess kind of lines up and makes sense. Liam, you have anything on this? >> There there were definitely some backdoor incentives going on uh between, you know, Tron uh co-founder uh Justin Sun definitely getting closer to at least the Trump Sons. Tether uh obviously has a lot going on with um with the US stable coin bills. There are just like a lot of um aspects of overseas trading that uh you know goes through Tether Tether on Tron and um that they're just really incentivized in order to reopen these markets. uh as well as just like there everybody in the administration wants to mutually see the other one succeed whether it's launching uh whatever token on world liberty fire or or whatever it needs to be um that they want to drive more revenue to both parties um and be able to make money and so I I agree that this is uh this is an interesting aspect that they're now just opening it because they can tax it. It's probably net a good thing just to have less regulatory barriers to go into each of these uh different exchanges because you know you want to see free market forces win rather than just uh winners chosen by regulation by enforcement and uh like just like we're seeing with tariffs. It just you know limits competition and then uh thus drives the worst experience overall for the consumer in the short term. it will necessar there will definitely be some losses based on uh rehypothecation of you know the underlying assets whether it's Bitcoin or all these other exchange or all these other tokens as well. Um, but you know, we're we're just going to be buried early into um all of this and so it's better to have the ability to trade on all the different exchanges in the long term rather than just be limited to to the Coinbases and the other US uh doiciled exchanges. Yeah, I think the key point though is they're all effectively like becoming deridatives of the US government because if you go back to the framework in early like call it pre2020 these were effective like wildcat banks and they were all running without oversight without you know with somewhat clear autonomy outside of like complete you know smuggling money into like sanction or terrorist organizations. they were free to reign, but it was hard to understand what was happening and to really have um your finger on them if you needed something to happen. And so we saw this with like Binance effectively getting like, you know, pimp slapped and thrown in jail so he could come under control. You had, you know, FTX, which is a whole other situation on, you know, was he kind of planted in there to really bring about a lot of this kind of like change. Um, but Tether's another great example of pre-2020 it's been whitewashed incredibly like their status in the crypto markets. But again, pre-2020 when you look back at uh t uh I don't know if it's telk I forget but it's uh >> the the banking intermediary and then the New York attorney general Deltech. Yeah, the the shady history there. even the inception of Tether um the notion of okay now you know we have control there we can seize there's a lot uh so there's Binance there's air there there's the uh derbit um acquisition by Coinbase and there's what's happening here is that sure they'll be allowed but you're just going to have a complete different level of oversight lack of autonomy um that will be controlled by the US and by these regulators in the same way like you know um the most liquid and in uh exposed you know markets are the traditional financial markets in New York similar example it makes sense that the US wants to u be the leader here but is it in the best interest of the individuals globally trading the beauty is this is like technology and at the end of the day you can't really like uh you can't really put too many firewalls around technology uh and so I don't think like I think a lot of these things are it's like the early internet trying to put a firewall around like an internet like AOL basically uh and how you could get access to that. But like the reality is people the value is accured by the network effects and the network effects can't be like limited but we're just in an early period where you'll see a lot of rent extraction and also um shaping of the different ways businesses are either built or able to get access to US customers by basically bending the knee. >> Yep. No, that makes total sense. Um, all right. We are coming up on time. There was one more link I did want to shift to. Michael, you brought this one and I think it's kind of a perfect uh cherry on top of this whole discussion around confusion with altcoins versus Bitcoin, the sound money trade, um, and how this can all go wrong. Um, so this is, uh, from the Stanford Review. University of Chicago lost money on crypto, then froze research when federal funding was cut. Um, and so I think this this refers to um a crypto allocation that the University of Chicago made in 21, I believe. Um, lost money on it. Um, and now they're seeing the the ramifications of that. But I'll hand it to you, Michael. >> Yeah, I mean, that's that's basically it. And just showing that these endowments and and I think the endowment is a proxy for any financial institution. Um if you if you stop there the the quote is like the university carries in nearly six billion in debt while running an annual budget deficit of 200 million. Um and you see this across uh the board where that I think in 21 it says they had a 37.6% uh gain but then if you keep scrolling down it shows kind of where they had a mark the rest of the the years and they were below I believe just passive funds. Um, I think there's another tweet. I I don't know where, but I think >> just 7.5% versus 12.8 for probably the S&P. >> Exactly. And it also starts to hint at other endowments um not marking their private assets. And um it it just the whole thing comes back to what we've been discussing is a lot of these financial institutions are effectively insolvent. they haven't marked down a lot of the bad investments and um it ties into the crypto stuff because these different institutions just get lost in the sauce of what's getting pitched to them from the consultants tradi and other markets forces that they ultimately are making these bad bets um in the same way they're making bad bets on you know traditional venture and um this is just one that came out where they, you know, acknowledge the loss, but we've seen this with the Canadian pensions. Um, and I think we're just going to continue to see it. Now, it's interesting. Harvard on the other side of that understands the kind of predicament they're in and they allocated that $und00 million position plus to BTC and gold. Um, but I don't think we're going to get that level of sophistication. And we still don't know, you know, the level of their kind of their financial standing, but I think as we continue to see this inflation um trade pick up, we're going to not have we can't expect all these quoteunquote sophisticated institutional investors to go to Bitcoin and gold and they're going to go to crypto and they're going to have to, you know, suffer similar to um this endowment. >> Yeah. anything on this one? >> No. Agreed. Um there are going to be a lot of people that try to dig themselves out of holes by going out on the risk curve and it's just going to bring them further into the hole. Um so this is uh I think this is uh something interesting that we'll continue to track moving forward too. >> All right, boys. Uh, I think we got through most of the list. Michael, did you want to chat at all about um some inerson events that early riders will be at in the coming weeks? >> Yeah, we're still um getting the exact dates on certain private events, but um in September, we will be in Nashville the majority of the week. Um Bitcoin Park is hosting a small summit or conference around custody in Treasury and then there's an Imagine if conference. Um, so we'll be there hosting an event. I believe Thursday evening will be the, uh, private event. So if you're interested in joining, just shoot us a note and then, uh, we'll be in Dallas for the North American Blockchain Summit. Um, so we'll be hosting a few one-on ones, um, dinners, and then private events for clients and prospective clients. So if you're interested in any of that, just shoot us a note. Um, you can do it at Michael onramp or earlyers.com or Brian or Liam. We all have similar email uh, constructs. >> Sounds good. All right, boys. Appreciate it. See you right next week. Later. >> 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 Onra Media is forformational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are in your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com/cont to schedule a consultation with one of our private client adviserss.