Fed Speak, Gold ATHs, DeepSeek, State-Level Adoption, & BTC Dominance

Jackson Mikalic (00:02.482) All right, welcome back to The Last Trade. We are excited to kick off a new format for the show. We've been teasing it out the past couple weeks, but from here on out, what you can expect is the four of us you see here on screen. For those listening, we have, who have been my co-hosts for quite some time now, Brian Cabellus and Michael Tanguma of OnRamp, and then we have Tim Cotsman. We're honored to be joined by Big Tim, host of the Bitcoin Treasuries podcast, Private Equity. fund manager, doing a lot of stuff in both traditional finance and Bitcoin. So for those who will be following along and have been following along, this is what you can expect now. The four of us are just going to be riffing on a ton of topics, keeping you up to date on the markets, Bitcoin, adoption, tech deals, what have you. And then we'll also be bringing in people. We'll be doing some, you know, some five, five way pods for those that are interested in that. When the opportunity... when the opportunity presents itself. So, gentlemen, great to see you all excited for this new format. It's gonna be a lot of fun and I think the listeners are gonna get even more value out of the show. How is everyone doing? Michael Tanguma (01:12.287) good. Jackson appreciates a good five-way, so you know we had it. Brian Cubellis (01:15.021) Yeah, sometimes you gotta throw five heads at it. I mean, that's just the reality. But this is the Core 4, very excited for this crew going forward. Michael Tanguma (01:23.469) I'm filling out alt number though because you get this like northeast contingent, you know, right there. I'm just down here in Texas holding it down. But I think it's good. We got to have, you know, Tim specifically with that orange tie and sitting in ground zero of all that's happening in New York City to let us know what's happening on the ground floor of Bitcoin and Wall Street. Brian Cubellis (01:31.253) Not enough Texas on the panel for you. Tim Kotzman (01:47.916) Yeah, you've heard of the power of two, this is the power of four. Jackson Mikalic (01:52.787) Yeah, well Michael, it's kind of a shame to see you're the only person down in Texas, but it's clear I guess that we've known that Philadelphia was the Bitcoin capital of the world, but it's also, we know as well that New York is maybe second best to Philly. But let's start with the price. We got pulled up here on the on-ramp terminal, which anyone could check out if they'd like. We got the price live action here. We got 105,000. 663 per BTC. Gentlemen, what are the thoughts? I have some of mine, but Brian, let me toss it over to you. What's driving the price this week? Brian Cubellis (02:33.397) Yeah, I mean, it could be a number of things. think for me, there's been a few things that have happened this week that might be influencing Bitcoin price right now. You've got your typical sort of more Fed speak driven narratives. So FOMC met yesterday. Biggest takeaways from that were effectively they're keeping rates unchanged. And so that was. expected by markets like 99 plus percent probability for that to be the case. But it was somewhat of a departure in that it broke a streak of three consecutive rate cuts dating back to September. And so some of the, like I said, the Fed speak, the reading of the tea leaves has shifted somewhat from mentioning in the past that they were making progress towards their inflation targets. to now signaling inflation remains somewhat elevated. Taking a step back, though, I would say all of Fed speak, Fed policies type stuff is very much just short term noise in my mind, and really does nothing to address the structural issues at hand. So massive public and private debt burdens that will inevitably lead to further monetary expansion and currency debasement. so this pause in rate cuts, doesn't really alter the long term trajectory of Bitcoin or any other scarce assets that would benefit from continued debasement of the currency. And so you sort of compare and contrast that with at the same time, have gold breaking out to all time highs somewhat quietly and Bitcoin starting to move up again. so that's, to me, the real signal is not what Jerome Powell has decided to say this month. but more what is happening in hard assets effectively, so gold and Bitcoin. And I think part of the gold story too, you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there was a report earlier this week that effectively some London gold markets allegedly don't have enough physical gold to satisfy the paper claims, which is just so classic, like this is a flaw of gold, it's harder to verify than Bitcoin, obviously. And so you run into these instances where Brian Cubellis (04:55.885) There's too many paper claims effectively. And so you're seeing the price of spot gold start to move as well. So that's what I think could be influencing just very short term price action and sort of how I've perceived what's happened throughout the week. Michael Tanguma (05:11.821) will say one thing I listen to fed speak is when they talk about banks being able to custody their crypto. Brian Cubellis (05:17.867) Yeah, that was the other thing big Jerome Powell had a line in there around his confidence in that the banks would be able to custody assets, custody digital assets and Bitcoin, which I found interesting. It's certainly just a massive pivot from prior government or Fed speak around Bitcoin and then and other assets being. They're just more legitimized now. So it's into the conversation of, banks are going to custody these. Yeah, they're prepared to do so. Don't worry about it. It's very different from the past several years of, I don't know if these banks can touch these high-risk assets. So it is a distinct change in that respect. Jackson Mikalic (06:02.48) Yeah, no, I agree. I think the FOMC stuff did move the markets a little bit. One thing I think is worth pointing out is there's about seven trillion dollars of debt that needs to be refinanced by the U.S. Treasury this year. And so Powell can hold out for now, I would say, with higher rates. But the reality is that the fiscal situation is already extremely messy in the U.S. but also globally. And so rates will need to come down at some point to prevent more, I guess, worse liquidity conditions, tighter financial conditions from impacting the U.S. Treasury and their ability to refinance that debt. So that's something to pay attention to. And then I think Trump also in his first week in office said something pretty strong, some strong language about how he's going to demand that rates come down in the U.S. And so I at least like that Trump is straightforward and will acknowledge the fact that there is really very limited independence between the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve because central banks like to pretend that they are independent, they make their own decisions, but in reality, especially with debt levels the way they are, these two institutions are very intertwined. And so Trump wants rates to come down because he wants stimulation within the economy. And he also likes to look at the Bitcoin price now, importantly. So he wants the Bitcoin price to go up as part of his barometer for a healthy economy and markets, which that's not priced in yet as Donnie wanting to pump Bitcoin. Brian Cubellis (07:42.253) There was a hilarious clip I saw yesterday of some reporter or interviewer asking him, like, you know, so you would just tell him that he needs to cut rates. And he's like, yeah. And he's like, do you think he would listen to you? And Trump kind of like pauses for a second and goes, yeah, I think they'd listen to me. It's just like, you're right, though, Jackson. He's just like very overt. Like, yeah, this is what needs to happen realistically. And to be honest, like, Powell knows that, too. He knows rates can't stay here. He knows it's unsustainable. So it's just that it gets back to like the feds be kind of bullshit of like even the stuff he says he doesn't really believe long term makes any sense. Michael Tanguma (08:23.575) Tim, how do you feel? In regards to kind of the Fed conversation we talked about with banks custodying the asset because I feel like that's a big component in the Treasury narrative for businesses and corporations that you're gonna have that asset sitting right next to you know your bonds and other cash equivalents as you're running an operation because I think that's something that as natives we don't really think much about but there's a lot of kind of friction when you're moving around capital to get exposure to Bitcoin versus being able to buy it in your existing capital stack when you're managing your corporate finance. Tim Kotzman (08:56.918) Yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how quickly banks roll out any sort of custody services. And if that's akin to the ETF rollout, where it's almost like family offices, ultra high net worth, and then down to retail, and then, you know, but maybe your bank does it maybe. They don't do it. Meaning, some time, some U.S. citizens still can't buy the spot Bitcoin ETF in their brokerage account, which is nuts because we're over a year in. then. Yesterday with J-PAL, he he just hit me with the question and answer that he was dancing around and really being pretty dovish. in my view, where he's like, you know, we've had some readings that have been good, some that have not been so good, but we're just looking for serial readings to be heading in the right direction. And it appears that we have a path to get there. And it just seemed to always be threading this needle of being able to see this path to lower rates. So I don't know if I was just reading way too much into it, but, I feel like my reaction to it, and maybe the market took it the same way, is, okay, there's no change in interest rates. That's nothing. It's neutral. everything's a forward-looking statement. What is he looking towards? you know, outside of other events or industry-specific events, everything kind of stayed the same, maybe pulled back just a tiny bit, but seems like everything's kind of heading higher. Michael Tanguma (10:54.017) except for gold right that's what we talked about Brian referred to or Jackson on You know, we talk about like Bitcoin's the canary in the coal mine, but it feels like gold is generally the leading indicator before Bitcoin. think the breakout last year from that roughly 2000 range and you know, 22, 2400, preceded by a few months before Bitcoin really took off. And so with its all time high, there's something there going on, whether it has to do with illiquidity of delivery or also just to your point, know, dovish conditions where there's going to be some easing and... naturally start to have hard assets start to run. Brian Cubellis (11:30.477) Tim, you make a good point though about the Fed speak and sort of this dance that Powell has been doing for what seems like over a year now, frankly. I guess the question that comes to my mind and curious anyone's thoughts on this is like something that they have sort of dangled out there in the past in some commentary is like basically revising the target rate to whether it's, know, target CPI rate, mean. you know, up from 2 % to whether it's 2.5 or 3%. And to me, that's like, actually probably the most likely medium to long term outcome is they end up bringing interest rates down, not because they've reached the 2 % target, but just because they've revised the target and the new CPI target is 2.5 or 3%, which as we know is like, you know, meaningfully higher than 2 % right on a compounded basis over 10, 20, 50 years. A 3 % CPI is much, much, much different than a 2 % CPI, both sort of disastrous over the long term. But that would be a significant change. Like you guys have any thoughts on if that's, cause in my mind that's kind of like the most likely path here is they don't actually get CPI to come down meaningfully. to prior targets, no matter how much massaging they do to the data itself. Tim Kotzman (12:59.678) I totally agree. I mean, they can change whatever they want. They change the basket of goods all the time. So why not? I mean... Jackson Mikalic (13:00.06) Yep. Michael Tanguma (13:08.523) all roads lead to inflation. There's no no way around this. Tim Kotzman (13:13.078) Yeah, I more often than you would think, I have conversations with people where I say, do you know what the Federal Reserve's mandate, dual mandate is? And they're like, no, I have no idea. Like, well, it's full employment and 2 % inflation. And they're like exceeding their goal, like wildly exceeding their goal on inflation every year, 2 % inflation. And do you know what 2 % inflation is? No, I have no idea. Well, it's devaluing your money by 2 % a year. What? So it's like getting back to basics. Brian Cubellis (13:42.285) Yeah, but Tim, some banker in New Zealand said that was good, like 40 years ago. Tim Kotzman (13:47.168) It is, yeah, it's really good. Jackson Mikalic (13:48.679) Well, actually, Brian, it is good, actually, because they take your money and it becomes theirs. yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of the natural conclusion, right? Because there's no way that all the liabilities and all the debt gets paid without creating more money. And so it's good to talk about what's going on with the price and what is J-PAL talking about. But it actually doesn't matter. And I get frustrated to even talk about it because it… Tim Kotzman (13:51.66) Ha ha. Jackson Mikalic (14:18.414) is really just bullshit at the end of the day. We're talking about a made up metric and we're also anchoring the entire economy and decisions around this metric that's made up. So it's actually incredibly frustrating when you think about that. And then you also think you could extrapolate this to the US treasury markets that are heavily manipulated as well. That's the basis, that's the hurdle rate, right? In traditional finance we're talking about What equity risk premium do you need above the risk-free rate of US Treasuries? And that's just another, it's still somewhat of a free market, but it's based on flawed metrics and data that's manipulated. that's, like this entire system is just manipulated and favors whatever outcomes those who pull the strings won. And so that's going to be higher inflation over time because that's what's needed to actually get through this mess. Jackson Mikalic (15:13.54) I do want to hear some thoughts real quick before we pivot into more Bitcoin related news. Brian, can you share or anyone but Brian I'll give it over to you first. Just thoughts on DeepSeek. It doesn't need to be long. I just want to touch on it quickly but wiped out $600 billion of market cap of Nvidia. The whole market was selling off. Bitcoin sold off. Thoughts? Brian Cubellis (15:37.505) Yeah, some thoughts. And caveat all of this, I am not an AI expert by any means, a very cursory understanding of all these things. But basically, the story that occurred earlier this week that caused some turbulence in US equity markets was effectively the release, the open source release of a large language model called DeepSeq. from an entity in China, I think it was like a hedge fund in China. And the claim, the alleged claim is that they basically built this model, which is on par if not better than sort of its Western AI counterparts. The claim is that they built it with a fraction of the capital effectively. So I think the number that's being quoted is like 6 million with an to develop this. And so that's obviously just, you know, orders of magnitude less than the open AIs of the world are pouring into AI infrastructure and building and training their models. And so a few takeaways from this are effectively. I think what, what we know around like deflationary technology, right? Like it allows you to do more with less and be more efficient by leveraging those deflationary tools. so. The internet was an example of this, AI is an example of this, and even Bitcoin is an example of this. And so I think this is why it's particularly interesting in the context of US equity markets is effectively, it was a wake up call to a lot of people that store long term value in US equity markets, which is a large swath of investors that use the S&P or the NASDAQ or the MAG7 to store value into the future. That was sort of a wake-up call in that maybe you can be disrupted overnight by a more efficient player who's leveraging deflationary tech better than you are. And also just the notion that they open sourced it was kind of interesting in the sense that I think there was a notion that anything that China was going to be doing on the AI front would be closed source. Brian Cubellis (17:51.309) Obviously, pivoted from that, open sourced it, which is very different from some of the companies in the West who are not open source. That was another interesting angle. I think it calls into question, effectively, are US equities a good store of value? Probably not, because there's competitive forces, there's execution risk, there's disruption risk. these deflationary technologies accelerate, which that is what's going to happen. We've already seen this play out over the past several decades, but it's only going to accelerate from here with the likes of AI. so it's just something to be cognizant of, and I think was sort of a wake-up call to a lot of US investors and why you saw some sell-off. Michael Tanguma (18:38.189) Yeah, I this is a super interesting and fascinating ties into the Bitcoin conversation. like, I there's two factors. And Jackson, we talked a little bit about this on final settlement. to call it back out is that there's like, above our pay grade, I think all of ours on a geopolitical level, if there's any kind of like screwy going on around like why it happened after the inauguration and all that. like independent of that, the theme that Brian said around deflation, And the tailwind is what that means for equities and businesses. I think it's really important, but also to distill it down to something that like makes sense less around an ephemeral equities like, you know, multi-trillion dollar marketplace. It's like at the end of the day, there's been this misaligned incentives across capital formation to there's all this liquidity. So you have to throw it at all these firms and they raise these billion dollar rounds. have to raise the venture capital of the private equity firm has to raise the bill. because they get the management fees, they get the capital stack. All this excess capital has to go somewhere and then you ultimately have to deploy it to others. like a good example, this was SoftBank with the WeWorks and Ubers of the world. It was widely known that when they went and put the capital in front of them or had the conversations, it was almost like a, it was a do or die in front of like Uber where they told them if you don't take this money, well, we're going to give it to Lyft. And then when you take that money, you have to go and do something with it. And this happened across, I think this probably happens across all large, venture firms in some capacity. why this matters is, so if you give a venture firm, whether it's 10 million or they have $10 billion, they have to deploy that capital, and now they have raised $6 billion and they have to charge and have this growth trajectory that OpenAI was on. Well, what happens when you open source and you build it at one one hundredth or one one thousandth of the cost and now it's free or it's one one hundredth of the cost to the open market? All that capital just gets destroyed effectively because why would you spend as an individual ten dollars or a hundred dollars per month when it costs, you know, a dollar, whatever the case is. And that's across all capital markets that all this money has just been, it's neutered, it's effectively drowned out all efficiencies and you Michael Tanguma (20:53.533) in economics and businesses. so anyway, that's just like a more overarching theme. We had a report that I wanna pull up because it really like viscerally shows, yeah, shows us through from early writers is basically the amount of money supply and then the amount of seed fund raises or seed company raises. but then the cost of starting a business and developing economies. You have these natural resources where it costs less to start a business, AWS, all these things, but at the same time, venture capital firms raise more capital and businesses have to raise more money. It makes zero sense. And so I think this is just a product of what we're gonna see more of, independent of why they did it. It's just a forcing function. And when you think about capital allocation and who you're giving your money to. Jackson Mikalic (21:45.043) Yeah, it's wild. like these charts just because you don't need to pull them back up. But I like those charts because this problem actually only accelerates. There's only going to be more money and technology is only going to become more efficient. So it's like that that alligator mouth just continues to widen where you have like who knows what a trillion dollars is 20 years from now, right? Like we're to have to have new metrics. If we're still using the U.S. dollar and other currencies, we're just going to have to continue to make up larger and larger units of this currency while in the flip side of it, everything should be getting more efficient. It should be getting cheaper. And yeah, I like this one too, Michael. What are we looking at here? Michael Tanguma (22:21.069) Yeah, so it's effectively showing from 1990 to 2020, the reduction in amount of employees it took to generate a million dollars at a S&P 500 company. So it's just this notion that what seven or eight people could have done 30 years later, it takes one to two to generate that same million dollars. And you can take that, you can extrapolate that to your point. Because I think the kicker here is where you always hear there's gonna be a first billion dollar business by one individual. And I think eventually that happens, but it's ultimately gonna be a Bitcoiner. And it's gonna be somebody that understands Bitcoin deeply because then they're ultimately always gonna get to the most optimal outcome of how they can make more Bitcoin. And so we talked about it's like, well, DeepSeek did it at 50 million with, I don't know, 100 people. I can almost guarantee you they either understood Bitcoin and were trying to make more, or if somebody does understand what they know and understands Bitcoin, they're gonna be able to do it at $25 million with 50 people. Because you're just gonna find optimal outcomes because if they raise that capital in Bitcoin and sit on it, then every decision is gonna be like, how do I get more efficient? And that's effectively what they did independent of if they were denominating their capital stack in Bitcoin or not, they just made their money go a lot further because the incentives or the constraints were there versus you raise a billion dollars. Well, sure, you need a billion dollars. GPUs and all the things associated with it. Brian Cubellis (23:40.071) The other thread here worth pointing out is a lot of what Jeff Booth talks about and the price of tomorrow and just this notion of deflation. As technology advances, we get more efficient as a species, things should get cheaper. Quality of living, standard of living should go up and things could get cheaper. The reason that doesn't happen is because we debase the currency in tandem with that deflation. basically a necessity of a credit-based fiat system that you can't have severe prolonged deflation. Otherwise, that mounting debt load basically is impossible to pay off, and it gets harder and harder to pay off as deflation occurs. So the other core takeaway of all of this is like, yes, this is all going to continue to accelerate, and even more reason why you need basically a finite battery to store all that excess productivity and efficiency in, which is Bitcoin. And so as this continues to play out, think people will wake up to that reality that you need to be basically efficiently storing those productivity gains from these deflationary technologies in an asset that won't be diluted. Michael Tanguma (24:55.755) It's actually super bullish on humanity when you really think about it because for every person that's laid off, somebody's going and sitting around and figuring out how to actually produce value because all these companies were effectively, it's known that Google doesn't need these many of employees. We saw what happened with Twitter. Those individuals, when you get paid $250,000 a year to hang around, well, you're just like happy. But the second that you have to figure out how to like survive, that's when you naturally start to build products and services. And we haven't had that for 20 plus years. You've had all these very intelligent people to try to figure out how to optimize your brain. and we're just going to go to this world because of inflation and because of deflation that people are going to be out having to build better products. So it's going to be painful but it's also going to bring a really you know interesting future when it comes to like a renaissance of just innovation. Brian Cubellis (25:42.005) talking golden age boys. Jackson Mikalic (25:42.354) Yeah, better orange, orange age with orange man and the orange coin. Michael Tanguma (25:48.887) Yeah, I mean the old the Golden Age isn't it interesting I don't know the exact quote but did you all see like he she referenced 1870s in 1912 like there was something that he wasn't You know what I'm talking about Tim like he didn't reference it as the Golden Age or what is it? LaBelle the Pope and like it but he referenced That years he wants to go back from it was just funny because that's basically the Gilded Age Tim Kotzman (26:11.894) I thought maybe he was speaking to that around his comments on income tax. Jackson Mikalic (26:20.602) Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. was part, at least part of it. Yeah. So I wanted to talk about Tesla because we're talking about capital allocation, talking about Bitcoin treasuries with Big Tim Cotsman here. And so let's talk about fair value accounting, Tim. I think the number was $500 million of income that Tesla was able to mark up in this most recent quarter. You want to speak to that and- Brian Cubellis (26:21.837) I think that's right, yeah. Jackson Mikalic (26:50.438) how that will continue to see this play out for other Bitcoin corporate treasuries. Tim Kotzman (26:56.502) Yeah, so I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I believe that markup from indefinite and tangible accounting to the new FASB accounting, fair value, accounted for, I think, 26 % of their earnings. So it'll be interesting to see how everyone from mainstream media to the algorithms and traders and how everybody's accounting for. the operating business versus the treasury business, whether it's Tesla or MicroStrategy. I mean, I don't want to say the wrong number and I don't have it in front of me, but it's, think MicroStrategy's Bitcoin hoard is like 47 times bigger than Tesla's. So what happens when MicroStrategy adopts the FASB accounting? Probably a positive development. Brian Cubellis (27:54.301) Is there any notion though that like if you're a sophisticated analyst on Wall Street like you've probably been pricing that in to your analysis for at least the past 12 months? Like so is it this massive change that people are expecting it to be? Tim Kotzman (28:10.722) I think that's the question. I don't know. I know that when they had whatever the numbers were, $66 million or $60 million, it was like a hundred X on their market cap when the market cap of Tesla went up by 5 % yesterday. it just, the math alone is pretty staggering. Michael Tanguma (28:33.581) I have this unpopular take that I don't think any of Wall Street people care about what MicroStrategy does or doesn't do. It's actually like they care less what it looks like simply because it's become like a caricature of like... of a business. So like, don't think anybody's modeling outside of like hardcore, either somebody that's, I don't even see a hardcore Bitcoiner. I think it's somebody that on the edges is trying to maybe seize their businesses kind of like similar to strategy, MSDR back in the day, like it was just stagnant. They weren't going anywhere. And so it's like, how can I have a new narrative and juice it in the capital markets? I think what like prudent, traditional CFOs and analysts are looking for somebody that comes out and puts a very conservative conservative placement like goes through the consensus from a governance perspective, explains why they did it, explains the tailwinds. I think that plays a lot of a much larger factor in what we're talking about than anything really microstrategy does. Just because it just it's hard to it's hard to wrap your head around why. If you're running your business and you're worried about all these other things, like how are you ever going to do anything that MSCR does? It just doesn't feel like it's apples to apples. Tim Kotzman (29:53.92) Yeah, I mean, basically there's micro strategy and then that's it. I mean, there's just so few companies that have more than even a thousand Bitcoin on their balance sheet that it's really an outlier that to your point, Michael, no one's really paying attention to. So it'll be interesting when we get to that moment where as the volatility continues until the lesson is learned that, you know, lots of eyeballs. continue on to this and my theory is you'll have some combination of executive order, congressional act and states adopting Bitcoin that at some point spurs more corporates to adopt at least a portion of their cash into Bitcoin, probably the cheer. Michael Tanguma (30:40.749) This is a great chart Jackson because this is what I was getting at. it's like MSTR, we're looking at the top Bitcoin treasuries. So it's MSTR with 471,000, Marathon with 40,000, you have Riot, Tesla, Coinbase, Hud8, Block. So Block's like the first one you get to that's not like pure, well in Tesla but they both have insanely eccentric CEOs that you're not looking at them for your capital. to protect your capital sack, specifically block and Jack Dorsey and Cash App, but like you go through this list, there's not whatever it be, they're like a Facebook or just a company that is recognized for their underlying business structure and then somebody coming out and saying, look, this is why we did it at a very small percentage. And I think more of that has to happen to really move the needle from like a Wall Street perspective or at least like publicly traded companies. Jackson Mikalic (31:32.147) Yeah, like we had a conversation last night, Michael, Brian and I, where it became apparent that most people just think that we're playing with this thing, right? Trump said that in his speech at Nashville, literally said, have fun playing with your Bitcoin and crypto. And so I think that is the perception where it's starting to become recognized as an asset class. I think that started in 2024. People were Michael Tanguma (31:47.01) Yeah. Jackson Mikalic (31:58.387) saying that it was happening for years prior to that, but it really didn't. The ETFs were the first successful financial product for Bitcoin that aligns incentives. It's always about incentives, right? So Wall Street wants to make money. So now they have product. They want Bitcoin to succeed. And so 2024 was the first year for institutional adoption of the asset. And I would, I kind of lean, I'm somewhere in between Tim and Michael. mean, I think that, I guess where I would, would say I'm at is Bitcoin Treasuries is like, it's still the first pitch of the first inning, right? Like to your point, this chart is almost all micro strategy. If you look at this chart, if you're on video, you're literally just looking at micro strategies, Bitcoin Treasury, and then you have a handful of other smaller boxes here, but they're all almost all Bitcoin or crypto companies. Yeah. Brian Cubellis (32:46.405) Yeah, more yeah more. Yeah, more than half of them are miners and yeah, I would say it is it is a startling contrast and so I would say like the One that got me relatively excited was was similar when they made their announcement now they haven't you know accumulated on par with a micro strategy obviously, but like Yeah, but like that was that was a company that I had known and followed from like Jackson Mikalic (33:07.89) They have 2,000 here. Brian Cubellis (33:15.093) my TradFi days. I knew it as like a quality business that otherwise didn't need to do this. Like it was a cash flow positive business. And so that to me was like a really important one in terms of the adoption just because it was a credible business. It was more credible business than like what MicroStrategy was prior to their Bitcoin strategy effectively. But to your point, Michael, like we haven't seen a ton since then. it's really been more on the margins, very smaller players. Michael Tanguma (33:47.991) Yeah, and guess that the edit essence, it's a gimmick to most people looking outside. And then even for Semmler, I was actually on your side, we're like very interested in it, know, company adopting, thinking about macro tailwinds, inflation protection, but like, I only listened to one pod with him and he basically came at it as the gimmick angle of like, either something that he like, he didn't fully grok Bitcoin. It was like, I can play this up as far as like. Brian Cubellis (34:10.593) He knew it was a contrarian bet and he likes contrarian bets. Was I think the bulk of his thesis. Michael Tanguma (34:17.771) Yeah, which is to me is like a cousin of like I want to juice my stock price and this is an interesting thing. It's like the meta planets of the world, which are perfectly fine if that's what but it's just like a different angle from serious people sitting in a boardroom trying to establish a position here. Like that's not how they're going to underwrite it is at a gimmick level or a contrarian bet like they it needs to be something sound and it's just not there. And I think that's what why we don't see a lot of it independent because this ties back to the FASB stuff you talked about and you were referencing like it hasn't an analyst look This is like they've all looked at it. But the problem is like once you look at it and say it, you still have to generate the consensus at the corporate level, which is one of the probably hardest things to do. That's why we don't have that much adoption. Because there's people like us at all these companies, but then once you have to run it up the ladder, you're either like kicked out or you just end up hitting your head against the wall because people just think people are crazy. Tim Kotzman (35:09.28) Hey, Michael, do you think what Trump says stuff like have fun playing with your Bitcoin, that it's just like an off the cuff like. He's not even really thinking about it in advance for a comment, or is it like four or five D chess where it's like, well, we need to create this stockpile and we don't want people to front run us. So if people think it's more of like a toy, then that's actually strategically good for the United States. Or am I just like way off on the edge somewhere? Michael Tanguma (35:39.821) Definitely off on the edge where this is part of how we this is how we this is how we stumbled on the talking about your bitcoins because we were talking about you know mission and Things that we want to talk about and copy and like as an individual we all recognize what Bitcoin means and multi-generational and legacy and all that but when you throw that on a website like people look at it and they're like wait, this is a toy Brian Cubellis (35:41.056) You Michael Tanguma (35:58.477) you're gonna play with your bitcoins, how is that gonna protect your legacy? So it speaks to a subset of the market, but it doesn't speak to serious people that have legacies in the traditional world, right? So to bridge that gap, and so that's what I feel, and I think Brian Jackson would agree. Jackson Mikalic (36:11.378) I'll take a, I'm going to take a, it's going to sound, it's going to sound like I'm going against what I just said, but I think it's both where there is this perception that Bitcoin is like this toy or it's this made up technology and most people don't understand it yet. But there are enough people in Trump's cabinet and close to him that do understand Bitcoin and its strategic role. So who knows? mean, Trump just says shit. off the cuff, right? Like it's entertaining and it's comedic relief. I'm not going to read too much into those comments but I do think there's still a lot of people who probably like my family, they're like this guy's just playing with his Bitcoin. there are… Michael Tanguma (36:55.393) But think about the context of like what Tim had asked, like, so put yourself, you're Trump, you get all. What I was just referring to in the context of theirs, like he's in a room. How many people were in that room? Jackson Mikalic (37:00.634) I know and I was going there. Michael Tanguma (37:08.887) for any other thing, any other asset or not that evangelical and all the things that are associated. You imagine his like mentions on Twitter, like you know he pays attention to the engagement. So it's like, you guys are nuts. Like go have fun playing with your vic coins. That's what like is embedded. I don't think there's anything more or less to that. It's like you guys go have fun. Like I'm gonna give you what you want. You gave me a bunch of money. You guys allow, like appreciate it. And then to your point, in his cabinet there is people that recognize this. Jackson Mikalic (37:35.271) Yeah, that's fair. And so that's an interesting point then. So we're talking about playing with your Bitcoins and the perceived lack of adoption of Bitcoin within, let's say, non-Bitcoin or crypto related businesses, right? So we haven't seen a ton of it yet. I think all four of us agree that it is coming. Some of the roadblocks and toxicity around managing the asset are now gone. So it's going to happen at a much more accelerated rate going forward. What I do think is interesting though is there's a lot more announcements around state legislation recently. So right where I think we're now at 14 or 15 states that have introduced legislation around something Bitcoin related. It's not all strategic Bitcoin reserve bills. I think some of them are related to pensions, being able to allocate potentially into ETFs. But I think that's particularly interesting because last week we talked a little bit about When we were recording, we were talking about the digital asset stockpile bill or part of the investigating that as part of the executive order. So that's still on the table. think I forget if it's 180 days or something. But in the meantime, what we're seeing are states are being really they're serious about Bitcoin, right? They're they're looking into this in different ways. And so what do you guys think about that? That's accelerating. States are thinking about it from a Treasury perspective, more so maybe than corporates are right Brian Cubellis (38:58.465) Yet I think it's insanely bullish and not being talked about enough. It's actually in my mind like maybe not more important, but it's like a more logical path to government level adoption in the sense that Bitcoin is this emergent thing. It starts with the individual. And so it's logical that it would start with states as opposed to the federal level first in my mind. And it seems like there's a new one being announced every day or every other day. I think we're up to like 14 pieces of legislation at the state level now. And to your point, like I think this, if some of these get through, which I expect them to, it does start to give the corporate the air cover to say, well, this is clearly a reserve asset. Like it adds to the credibility of the argument when they go to their C-suite or their investment committee to say well like you know these 14 states are Accumulating Bitcoin for their Treasury like why aren't we as a corporate entity? So I think I think this is super important and extremely bullish Michael Tanguma (40:09.823) I think it's a cousin of the sovereign stuff we talked about at the base, you know as you get closer and closer to the end individual they are closer to the political framework and they all have I remember just because I live here like the the studies that they did Where for sound money like adoption if you were like under the age of 50, I think you wanted Bitcoin some kind of you know policy in Texas and if you're above 50 you want a gold back currency like people want a money that can't be debased and so I think to Brian's point you get closer to the signal as you get closer to the people and you know we should probably get Leon at some point because I know they're getting close Lee Bratcher in Texas to get this in place so yeah. Jackson Mikalic (40:53.703) Yeah, Michael, what do you think about that? Being the sole Texan here, the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, I think it was yesterday or could have been this morning, something about Bitcoin Reserve being a top legislation priority for 2025. Michael Tanguma (41:10.433) I think at the end of the day, like we talked about a lot, it's all about incentives. And in Texas, why the political framework has been so, has moved so much or so fast is because of the amount of hashrate, which means amount of revenue, which means amount of lobbying. And so it's a big deal. They understand that it generates revenue. I think there was a report that, I won't pretend to fully understand, but I think that the mining industry helped the grid with like a save $18 billion. last year that came out from I think it was the Texas Blockchain Council or one of the affiliates so this is like not something that is just pandering in the sense of like oh there's some interested parties it's like they understand that there's real enterprise that's being formed there's cities and Rockdale is one of them there's there's a bunch of like articles and things have come out where you've brought back jobs and capital to a state so it wouldn't make sense both Wyoming's also right there they've been there for a while as well as some others Jackson Mikalic (42:09.394) Yeah, well, I'm excited to see Pennsylvania there. The bill was introduced probably sometime in December, I want to say. If I remember correctly, it would allow for the state to put up to 10 % of the treasury into Bitcoin, which is the total treasury, I want to say, is about $7 or $8 billion. So max out allocation at $700, $800 million. And I think this is incredibly exciting. I think that this will happen likely before more accelerated corporate adoption. Maybe what will happen the fastest though, we are seeing this more and more just in conversation and tracking some of the data is within Wall Street. Wall Street adopt, if we think about three, there's like the public sector with states and federal, there's corporations and then there's Wall Street. I think the Wall Street adoption is happening at the fastest clip. 2024, however many billion. We're in iBit and other products now. I don't know the number off the top of my head. Most successful ETFs of all time. And I'm really excited to take a look into the 13Fs for the fourth quarter of 2024, because that'll show a lot of new allocations. We'll effectively be able to see what happened after Trump won in November. Did firms start to allocate in size? Were they adding to their positions? Do we see a lot of net new firms step in? Tim, I think there was one thing that you wanted to talk about too, just about some of these larger wirehouses. was like Wells Fargo, Stiefel, others that are allowing for greater access to Bitcoin ETFs. I actually formerly worked at Stiefel. I had an old account there. I wanted to buy the Bitcoin ETF in it like months ago before I rolled it over and I wasn't allowed to. So I put it into MicroStrategy and it probably somewhere break even right now in the MSDR position. Point aside, Tim, what are your thoughts on just widening adoption access within Wall Street for the ETF products? Tim Kotzman (44:11.51) Yeah, mean, yesterday, APA abacus, Andrew posted that they're expecting additional Bitcoin spot Bitcoin ETF approvals, which again, seems kind of silly to say a year after they were approved by the regulatory agency. But from multiple wealth management firms, to your point, by the end of Q1, names of note that will broaden availability, Wells Fargo, Stiefel, Raymond James, UBS. And then, yeah, another account did a crypto presentation to 700 financial advisors, including from Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, and similar firms. So I think it's all kind of brewing under the surface there. And then on the state's aspect of it, it reminds me of New Year's Eve. I'm standing there, Saywer's talking to us for a couple minutes, and one of his comments was, you know, people just tweet, right? You can just tweet all day long about whatever, but they won't read the first sentence of anything, let alone the entire 8K. So last night I listened to, you know, this took a lot of energy for me, like a whole three and a half minute video. It was Thomas McCarthy giving testimony in New Hampshire for the House Bill 302 for state. legislation for Bitcoin and he said, you know, they're also expecting this similar legislation to be introduced in Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, and others. And some of those states have been introduced over the last couple of days. But yeah, if you just kind of read the headline and make your assumption and either get super positive or super, you know. negative, it's not super helpful. So I think the devil's in the details with all of these things and there's so much going on that if you're not really spending hours a day, which most people are not, you can end up with the wrong impression pretty easily. Michael Tanguma (46:16.525) Yeah, I think one thing that Brian had mentioned is like the friendly administration from a federal perspective, federal level is the air cover because there's probably states that wanted to do this, but because of the heavy reliance on fed fund funding may have been just like banks, just like maybe we shouldn't do this. We don't want to rock the boat. And an easy example of this that we saw was El Salvador in the IMF. Because it's different, but it's kind of the same in that they adopted the strategy. And then I think this week they had to come and roll back even more. put in place a couple of years ago. And so that's the difference between having the air cover from whoever's capitalizing or helping. And the IMF is probably the furthest from liking Bitcoin at this point. Jackson Mikalic (47:04.304) Yeah, what do you guys think? there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, states, corporates, Wall Street. I keep anchoring to those three cohorts because when people talk about institutions, like those are the three cohorts worth paying attention to. I think the four of us generally are pretty busy working. we don't, Tim, to your point, we don't just get to sit on Twitter all day and read headlines. So trying to be discerning here on what actually the signal is from the noise. I'm curious guys, what did you see if you did see anything this week? Like what, what was the noise? I think we already covered a lot of signal, but was there anything caught your attention that was, whether it was in Bitcoin or crypto or just in broader markets, I would argue that J-PAL is noise. The Federal Reserve, they're always noisy, but I want to hear some better takes than that. Michael Tanguma (47:57.677) And Doge ETF just comes to mind because I think they finally filed that, but we've already talked about that one. That was a bit wise. Brian Cubellis (48:06.433) I think one narrative that I've seen the past few weeks is effectively like the crypto, so like ex-Bitcoin space is even though Bitcoin's like at all time highs, like a lot of altcoin speculators are basically wrecked right now. And Why that is is basically like you haven't seen like in prior cycles this like massive rotation from Bitcoin to altcoins. It just hasn't really happened. Like there's been a ton of liquidity pumped into meme coins and all these other things, but it hasn't like come from Bitcoin, which is what has happened in the past to some degree where Bitcoin sort of leads the rally and then sort of chills out for a little bit. And that sort of then distributes to altcoin market. haven't really seen that I think for a few reasons. One is just there's a different market participant right now with ETFs and just institutional and sort of nation state level adoption occurring where for one they have a long term view on the asset right so they're not looking to rotate into anything necessarily they're just looking to accumulate the asset and hold it and they're definitely not looking to rotate into meme coins or know XRP or something. And so I think that's a component in just like the market participants are changing. this is reflective of Jackson. You want to pull up that chart that River put out is a great one. Just showing the divergence and the decoupling of Bitcoin and broader crypto. And so you can see in prior cycles, it sort of maps where, you know, they're sort of rising and falling in tandem. And you've seen this departure over the past six to nine months or so. And so this is a big sort of signal to me that despite what we often say, like, you know, there's a ton of education that still needs to occur in terms of, you know, distilling why Bitcoin is very different. I think this is a signal that it is happening on the margins. People are beginning to realize that these things are different. And now there's just a whole cohort of the market that's only interested in Bitcoin and not the rest of the stuff. And they're not looking to rotate. They're not trading. Brian Cubellis (50:30.945) These are long-term allocations. And so it's partly investment time horizon and also just the sophistication of the allocator that I think is driving this slight departure from previous cycles, which I think is pretty interesting. Jackson Mikalic (50:48.07) Yeah, I think I generally actually agree with pretty much everything you said there, Brian. The big pools of capital, they're going to stick to Bitcoin only. I think where crypto continues to get pumped on the market cap side is just by shitcoin venture capital. That's not going to stop, especially as there's more dollars and more liquidity entered in the market whenever that next liquidity cycle picks up. So that'll be a catalyst for more market cap in the rest of the crypto space, but I think that'll be more heavily outweighed, it'll be significantly outweighed by all the other institutions that are stepping in from a more strategic asset allocation. And then you have the meme coins. I don't know where the tweet went. I saw a tweet last night about Murad's top 10 meme coins from like three months ago. If you bought his basket, you're down like 80%. And so it's just, it's a shame because Brian Cubellis (51:35.456) I that. Jackson Mikalic (51:42.673) Retail, think, will continue to get distracted at the top of the funnel. And there's infinitely more distractions. I don't even know how many coins are created every day now. It's absolutely insane. But you can just download apps to your phone now. You can buy whatever with Apple Pay. So like people are just like gambling rampantly in the meme coin space. And that's just going to get a lot of people wrecked. But I do think that chart that River put out, we're going to see a divergence there, an even greater scale. Bitcoin is... still about 60 % dominance in the market. And I think that in previous market cycles, right, it's maybe gone down to about 40 or so as, you know, old season picks up. I don't think that happens this time around. may, it may come down a little bit, but not much. Michael Tanguma (52:26.295) I'll take the complete other side of that. think we're giving, yeah, I mean, I think like, well, no, so like, I think there's two parts. There's the one that we talked about AI was there's all this liquidity. So AI naturally, like it ties into the discussion from the beginning about, or near the beginning about. Brian Cubellis (52:29.581) You think Trump's going to into a trillion? Because that's what it would take at this point, though. Jackson Mikalic (52:32.721) Yeah Michael Tanguma (52:47.391) Open AI and all these firms raising billions of dollars and venture firms raising billions to deploy or needing to like shift their positions into AI companies because they had this capital and they had to justify it going somewhere. So that rotation will just naturally come into crypto. There's not enough places to put. And then ultimately what you guys are describing is everyone waking up and realizing it's Bitcoin. It's the same side of like corporate adoption where maybe there's less consensus, but there's still big consensus that has to go and leapfrog from. This is speculative and a toy to now I'm gonna deploy meaningful capital to create that divergence. It's not to say it's not happening. It is happening because the market's getting more educated. But the way I look at it is for every one. individual that learns this, there's another 10 to 100 that come in via the awareness of crypto and naturally have to go through that until we hit that like deep part but we're still nowhere near that. And like the indications of that were just this week with like, you you mentioned Trump coin, it's like not Trump coin, it's Trump media launches truth via fintech with crypto ambitions or also the accelerated narrative around know fund managers as well that's come out this week that managers are ready to start deploying into crypto It's just it's just it doesn't support like I know what we want to happen and what we think but like at the end of the day the incentives aren't aligned for them to go because then how do you get paid for going and allocating the Bitcoin? Right. You got to go take a bet on the sector and it doesn't have to just be like altcoins. The security securitizing everything under the sun has been under the like happening that's rumbling and that's going to be a big thing. I know like large firms like multi-trillion dollar banks that are coming in and going to securitize everything under the sun and call it whatever. So yeah we got a long way to go before the Michael Tanguma (54:30.637) that divergence happens. But this is why we got it on tape so we can look back, you know, six months to 12 months. Brian Cubellis (54:32.437) Yeah. So your call for the record is you think Bitcoin dominance decreases from here throughout this cycle or stays the same. Michael Tanguma (54:42.925) As long as yeah, think that's fair. As long as the price of Bitcoin goes into the 125, 150 to the 200k range, that it's going to reduce dominance over the course of the next 12 to 24 months, not increase. Brian Cubellis (54:57.229) So that wouldn't. Jackson Mikalic (54:57.279) I actually said the same thing though. I said that... Michael Tanguma (55:00.631) I thought you said it's going to go to the opposite. It's going to go to 60. Jackson Mikalic (55:02.734) I don't know. Alright, let me put my position out there. I don't think it's going to go down as far as it has in previous cycles, which is probably around 40 % dominance. I can still see dominance going down a bit from here, but not much is my point. I would also wouldn't be surprised if it went up. So maybe I have a lot of takes going on here, but at the... Michael Tanguma (55:17.399) Ryan. Brian Cubellis (55:22.923) Well, I just think like, if we just think through the numbers a bit, let's say Bitcoin doubles, it's a $4 trillion asset. So for dominance to stay where it is, then you'd basically need a little over $2 trillion in other assets. And for just simplicity sake, like I'm not including like stable coins or like tokenized real world assets. Michael Tanguma (55:23.03) right here. Brian Cubellis (55:50.271) in this other bucket, because I just don't think that really counts. You're just digitizing existing assets. And so, yeah, you'd have to assume that broader altcoin space adds a trillion, if not more, in market cap. And in my mind, it's just like, well, where is that coming from? Because I think the magnitude of capital flow is just different. between what's gonna flow towards Bitcoin versus what's gonna flow towards a given meme coin or XRP. think there are just orders of magnitude difference. And so how do you move that broader altcoin market cap up that much? It would literally have to be like Trump coin going to like three quarters of a trillion or something. Michael Tanguma (56:35.757) So tell me if I'm missing something here, but if you're securitizing something on the blockchain or Doge is going to use a public blockchain, they're going to attach some token or some unit and subscribe some value to it. We know it's not needed, but they're not going to securitize things in a vacuum. Brian Cubellis (57:00.321) Right. Michael Tanguma (57:01.483) so that would be, they're intertwined. Brian Cubellis (57:04.717) That's fair. They're just not, they're not like alternate, like they're not alternative assets. They're existing assets on blockchain rails. So like I would include whatever the native token of those rails is, is yes in that ex-Pitcoin category, but like the actual. Michael Tanguma (57:13.559) I understand, I understand. Jackson Mikalic (57:13.616) Yeah, here, right, right. Michael Tanguma (57:21.249) and that's what will cause the pump. But that's what will cause the pump. So if you come in and you're gonna like... make an efficient doge or whatever or you're going to securitize like the bill, Biddle or whatever that securitizes is doing with BlackRock, like there's gonna subscribe some token to that in multiple and whatever, you we gotta get a resident expert altcoin but like there's bridges and multiple layers and roll ups and all this stuff that they're just gonna like sell to Wall Street to say like this is how you use this, this is where the future is and they understand diversification and like that sounds really sexy because you can get in early. Jackson Mikalic (57:55.155) I think a lot of times though the participation in these new memes and buzzwords and tokens is in the venture space. And so I tried to pull up the venture fundraising numbers the past couple years. I don't know if they're accurate. It was just the first thing I saw. was like about $60 to $70 billion, which seems low. But if that's the case, even if it's a bit higher, that's such a small number compared to the larger pools of capital that would consider Bitcoin only, in my opinion. So if it's like A16Z and these other crypto funds that participate in new altcoin issuance, that's just such a small market compared to traditional finance that may participate a little bit in that, but I just don't think it's scale. Like how many assets are gonna be in the Doge ETF by the end of the year? Michael Tanguma (58:45.773) The example to go back to that is this is why the take from Safe was really good about they shouldn't have put Sam in jail for what he did because he gives you the air cover like Ontario pension or whatever. Like God bless up in Canada, they've gotten rug so much like including in the crypto space. Then in 22, how many pensions were rug by going into investing not only in hedge funds that invest in these tokens, but also like the infrastructure. So they love that story. go to them because they're gonna like, it's like, well, you can have a higher return profile on this. So there's capital pools that will come into those assets that don't have to be like venture firms that buy up. know, like Paradigm's a good example. Their seed funders was a Yale, Charlie Swenson. You know, so like the capital exists to pass through via these other entities, but they'll go and buy the tokens. I'm just saying like it's not over for. Everyone's gonna wake up one day and realize Bitcoin's the thing and jump to their meaningful allocation. I think it's gonna help obviously with the administration and reputation that's grown from it. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong. It's just everything we've seen. It's like nobody just wakes up. like, Bitcoin's the thing. It's like, again, it's a gimmick. It's a toy for everyone. Which ties into the ledger stuff because like you give somebody a ledger or a coal card and you tell them put $20 million on it and they're like, you guys are jokers. Like, I'm just gonna go back to, you know, my negative yielding bonds because at least they don't evaporate tomorrow. Brian Cubellis (01:00:06.805) You Jackson Mikalic (01:00:11.31) Yeah, that's a fair point. what should we? Tim, are there any things before we jump into something else? Were there any other topics you wanted to cover? I feel like we went through a lot of news already, but I want to give you the floor as well. If there are some things that you've been paying attention to this week that we didn't get into. Michael Tanguma (01:00:31.116) And in. And to pull on what I just said, because I feel like Tim, you're, I don't want to say nearer to the space, but you're sitting in a somewhat different seat from your background coming in, who you're interacting like, what do you think about just kind of how we're, as it ties into what Jackson asked, where you see that adoption and do you think people kind of in the circles that you're running with or have adjacents from previous professional experiences, how they're going to come in? Because eventually a lot of people are going to come in because of the price appreciation in the sector. How do you see them adopting like different assets? Tim Kotzman (01:01:02.496) Yeah, so the cover of Forbes this morning, having Michael Saylor on it, actually really took me back because this morning you have Saylor on the cover. says, volatility virtuoso, Michael Saylor, the Bitcoin alchemist. Why Michael Saylor's micro strategy is a brilliant blueprint for manipulating traditional finance to harness the pixie dust of crypto mania. Now, Michael Tanguma (01:01:30.817) There you go. It's literally, they just distilled everything I was describing. Brian Cubellis (01:01:31.725) Jesus. Tim Kotzman (01:01:32.076) Right? Jackson Mikalic (01:01:32.249) Damn it. Tim Kotzman (01:01:36.736) And what I made a post. Brian Cubellis (01:01:40.279) Can't believe they didn't put the laser eyes on in there. That was a miss by them. Tim Kotzman (01:01:43.852) Yeah, and no orange tie. So you got to represent, it took me back because, Jackson Mikalic (01:01:44.562) No orange tie either. Brian Cubellis (01:01:46.039) You Tim Kotzman (01:01:53.482) I had met many years ago Aubrey McClendon, who was the CEO of the largest natural gas company in the United States at a certain point. And I was actually business partners with his nephew. there's just some history there where I was literally at his funeral. And he was on Forbes back in 2011. You can literally pull it up. I actually posted about it this morning. And the caption on Forbes was America's most reckless billionaire. There's two different threads here. One is there's a difference between being reckless and not being reckless when it comes to volatility. Like they don't have to be, you don't have to be reckless if you're dealing with volatility, but you could be. And then the aspect of you think about the story of natural gas and mineral rights, which is my background and how when you lease up and you drill, a lot of natural gas, you're creating more supply, it drives down the price, and sometimes that doesn't have a happy ending. I feel like now with Bitcoin, you literally have the exact opposite happening. You have a company that's levered long responsibly on Bitcoin, which is a finite asset. You can't just lease up more land and drill for more Bitcoin. And then just like the macro side of it, of how early we are, because Like, Early Riders is the first Bitcoin denominated venture firm. I don't know any other firm that offers Bitcoin treasury services like Acropolis. And so it took me back to like in 2015, I had zero competition, meaning like deal by deal. If I called up someone on my team called up a mineral owner in West Texas and said, we'll pay you $5,000 for these minerals. They're like, okay. I mean, some people said no, but some people said yes. We were buying for $5,000 an acre and we really had no competition. The next year we had competition, but we were paying $50,000 an acre. So we were the highest price and we had some competition at lower prices. So that's 2015, 2016. Fast forward 10 years to this morning, I get an invitation, NAEP is happening next week in Houston, which is the North American Petroleum Expo. Tim Kotzman (01:04:16.718) which like I literally have a business partner flying into it from India. know, oh, are you going to be there? Tim, are you going to be there? No, I'm not going to be there. The minerals and margaritas reception for the minerals and royalty space. Remember that I had no competition 10 years ago buying minerals in West Texas. Literally not everyone has even RSVP yet. Most people have. There's 274 Brian Cubellis (01:04:24.173) You Tim Kotzman (01:04:45.976) companies that are going to be at this reception. And so you do the math on whether there's one or two or four people from each organization. There's a thousand people just in one little industry, but you're not at the beginning of it anymore. And so at the sake of rambling, just, that all kind of, kind of hit me this morning with that sailor cover. And I think if you zoom, it's so, with social media, we're like, what's happening? which state introduced legislation today? But if you zoom out, it's like pretty incredible to think about how early we are in the adoption cycle. Michael Tanguma (01:05:31.629) I think in that example there was a lot of froth in people that made bids that probably lost their shirts because people recognize that. And so I think the example here is where their signal similar to yours and the minerals is Bitcoin, but you have this hyper liquid other market where you can create these things and tell good stories to sell them. And so it's to the point there's a lot of before the market gets efficient, it's just insanely inefficient because what we talk about here, it's hard to like wrap your head around. It takes months if not years to understand why there's only 21 million. that make Bitcoin valuable and so that's kind of like the delta net gap of how long the froth exists. Tim Kotzman (01:06:08.118) Yeah, and not even necessarily just like stock to flow or, but one of the physical side, you do have a lot of guys in real estate or something that they think they can either touch, see, or relate to. But like, I don't think anyone's ever actually seen natural gas. In fact, they actually put a chemical in it so you can smell it because it's odorless. Well, you can't smell Bitcoin either. Jackson Mikalic (01:06:08.241) Yep. Tim Kotzman (01:06:38.53) But if you're looking at the chart, you might be able to. So yeah, it's just like a lot of similarities that kind of weave the story of like why some people can appreciate it maybe before others. Brian Cubellis (01:06:41.197) You Jackson Mikalic (01:06:41.658) If you... Jackson Mikalic (01:06:52.39) Yeah, the early-ness thing too, Tim, that you mentioned, I think is fascinating. This relates to competition. We've been talking about it internally. I think Michael's pulled it up on a previous episode before. But the distribution of Bitcoin currently with 70 % of the asset being held by individuals. So individuals have really not had to compete with anyone besides themselves to acquire Bitcoin. That is going to change though. And now there will be competition, right? And so there was no competition from zero to a hundred thousand. Let's use those numbers just for ballpark and to be easy. But now there's going to be a crazy amount of competition from a hundred thousand to a million dollars per Bitcoin. So that's Tim, like what you're describing 2015, $5,000, 2016, 50,000. I think that's the same parallel where now we actually will have competition. won't be me competing with Tim. and who's going to stack more. It's going to be the four of us if we're continuing to stack, which I am. throwing in my little, you know, throwing my dollars here and there. But now we have nations coming in, corporations. We have Wall Street of all sorts of firms, family offices. And so this competition is going from virtually nothing to really intensifying. And so then I think that ties into just how early we are as an industry as well, because the products that exist today there's really not a lot of products that help these institutions allocate to Bitcoin securely. And then there's also not a lot of products and solutions that allow the people who were able to compete in this market of virtually zero competition to compete in the market now where you have to compete. And all this competition is driving the price of Bitcoin from $100,000 to $200,000 to $500,000 to a million. And so that's how early we are, right? It's like 70 % since the individuals. It's still only a $2 trillion dollar asset class. The $900 trillion number is outdated now. We should run new numbers. It's quadrillions. I don't even know. And now we're going to actually have to start thinking about, and that's what we do here, of course, but thinking about solutions that will get people securely from $100K to a trillion dollars. think that's $100K to a million dollars. That's how people have not appreciated that yet. Michael Tanguma (01:09:14.381) variable side. Jackson Mikalic (01:09:16.54) Yeah, that's my spiel. Brian Cubellis (01:09:19.312) We are indeed early. Jackson Mikalic (01:09:21.786) Yeah, I mean, come on, have like Joe Biden. Come on. Brian Cubellis (01:09:24.043) No, no, you're right. mean, dude, it's insane. Like, come on, guys. It's astounding. Just talking specifically about the ETFs, them being the most successful fund product launches of all time and not even being fully opened up yet. Imagine what the flows would have been last year if all the wirehouses, all the financial firms turned them on day one. they were the most successful products without even really being turned on. Like that is astounding and I think probably still being slept on a bit. Jackson Mikalic (01:10:02.406) Yeah. Michael, what's the single point of failure of the week? I think... Michael Tanguma (01:10:07.425) I think we can go with Brian's. think he pulled it up. sent it in the Slack channel if you want to pull it. Jackson Mikalic (01:10:12.306) All right, let me pull it up for you, Brian. Brian Cubellis (01:10:14.519) Yeah, I don't have a ton of context on this one. I just saw a tweet from a seems like a crypto altcoin type person who is referencing a friend of their there's that got effectively extorted extorted and robbed for seven plus figures. And, you know, he had some context here that is not like an overly public person about his crypto holdings. think this one was interesting to me just in the sense of like, I think we talk a lot about the importance of this stuff for high profile folks in Bitcoin or crypto. But the reality is it could happen to anyone. I think the person there references, they think maybe it was like someone close to them that tipped off the eventual attacker. it's just like all that is to say like, Yes, it's probably most important for people that are known in the space who are docs and have large balances, but attackers won't discriminate. If they have some informational edge that they can try to exploit, they're going to do that whether you're known or flashy about it or Michael Tanguma (01:11:29.601) Yeah, Jackson and had a very interesting conversation yesterday with a prospective client and we went through a lot of diligence and we're talking about it and at a certain point, you know, have to leverage what you know. I mean, this is where people come to a private Bitcoin institution. Like not only they coming for custody and financial services, but they're coming for You guys talk about it a lot in the investment management space. You go to specialize, you go to the experts because they're gonna tell you things that they know that the market doesn't or you as an individual don't because they've just been looking at the problem for a long time. And so we were walking through it and then he referenced, well, like this seems complicated. Like I gotta like, you know, ask to part like this partner and I gotta go, you know, video verification. And it was rather than like a piece of injection plug, I got kick out of it. like, told him it like, when the price is 250K, you're going to be begging to be asking for permission to move this thing. And the reason why... Because you just referenced somebody getting kidnapped I talked to another Founder yesterday that sold or two days ago that sold his company somewhere I won't disclose because it'll be easier to get to back into where it happened, but sold his company to another crypto firm Crypto firm CEO was kidnapped held ransom so we were talking about something completely unrelated to custody's like hey I want to talk to you guys And where this all goes is two parts. One is like all this metadata that we've talked that we've done, like whether it's like over socials, over emails, like all that data, you have to like assume somebody has peered into it at some point or will in the future. And you tie that to the blockchain and everything else that exists out there. It's not hard today and it definitely won't be hard in the future to discern what everyone's directional balances are. And what I'm starting to think about is I'm, I'm, I don't have no data on this, but I'm, I'm becoming more and more convinced that people have these large exchanges Michael Tanguma (01:13:17.301) because they hold thousands of employees or just selling the data. Like we know on the dark web it's the most expensive credentials you can get in information specifically like Coinbase. And so if somebody's willing to pay for it, all you have to do is click Excel, right? And like a couple things to get it out there. When the price is 200K and bad actors know this sits around, it's just like, it's part of the single point of failure. It's just this knowledge that you never have to speak about it. And... There's no other asset that exists on our person or around us that is worth hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars and all it takes is like one swoop to grab it. We see this with iPhones all day long and that's thousand dollar asset. Imagine somebody finds out that on a USB stick. So it's a good one to call out and that just to be thinking through that. Jackson Mikalic (01:14:07.248) Yeah, and it's messed up because... the awareness like we were talking about, right? The positive, more awareness around Bitcoin means more adoption, means higher price. And so we all expect that to happen over time. But then of course there's the counter to that, which is more awareness means much more mal-intent that comes into the space. There's more incentives for bad actors to target people. And then it's not only that too. It's not like It's not like everyone in the world needs to be concerned about this right now. I think it will become a bigger concern for more people and I think people also underestimate the likeliness of this happening, especially if you have more material amounts of Bitcoin. But what I do think is a higher concern or risk that people underweight is they actually are just playing with their Bitcoin at the end of the day. Like I'm joking but I'm not. People who do self-custody for the most part like plug it in. once every couple months, you know, they check on their seed phrase, it's still here, great. It's not like an actual serious thing, and there's nothing wrong with that. I personally don't wanna be doing that because I don't really like doing it, and I'm not good at it. And I know that there's more people that are like me than the opposite that have diligently done this and meticulously check on it and think about it. And so that's the thing is like, People are actually playing with this and it's fine if it's a thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars and it's five percent of your net worth. If you mess it up, it's not going to permanently destroy your legacy. And again, talking about legacy, right? We're talking about Bitcoin and legacy. But for us, that is the legacy. And for our clients, it is the legacy as well. And so you can't be playing with it anymore. It's like hard not to laugh, but you really can't be playing with it if it's a hundred thousand dollars per Bitcoin and you're sitting on five or 10, 20, 50, 100. Jackson Mikalic (01:16:03.462) what have you, right? Like this is something that needs to be seriously thought through. And most people just haven't done it yet. And so I think it ties into the competition. There's more competition for a scarce asset becoming more scarce over time, going to drive the price higher. And people are just not, you know, they're not taking the serious considerations that they should be. Michael Tanguma (01:16:25.655) The thing that's honestly the most frustrating is that like this whole notion of every like times a flat circle, like we've already done this before. Like Bitcoin is super transformative and we're watching an asset monetize in real time. But at end of the day, like gold is money for all because I think people get like caught with. Gold's 10 trillion, Bitcoin's gonna take 10x what gold is. But at end of the day, gold was money for hundreds, thousands of years. And the reason why banks were formed was ultimately to safeguard the asset. And then you can build a civilization around capital formation and coordinating economic activity. And the reason why that happened was because people got hit over the head metaphorically in their cave for their gold, and then militias form. And all these things happen. So to just like pretend like a bear that is digital, yes, it can be secured easier and it's just not to say you don't take some delivery of it because that's what makes it ultra valuable. to get to this point where it's a million dollars and the best that exists is holding it on a USB stick. And then anybody that's credible in Bitcoin will say, just hire a security or guard an army. it's just like, sure, you can do that. But then like you have family members and friends, and if they're related to you, like do they all have to? And there's always plot holes. Like it's just it's a broken market structure. Because when you think about Bezos or Zuckerberg, you can't kidnap them. They're like, if you think I mean, you can't kidnap them, but it'd be nonsensical because you're not going to get any of their capital because the amount of controls and and plumbing that takes to liquidate a position in any large asset and then move it through the banking rails is similar to how you can think about what we do with multi-institution custody and the different controls and in-person verifications. So it's just frustrating because a lot of people put people in these bad positions when we'll look back and we all understand why Coinbase shouldn't hold all the Bitcoin and we'll look back 15 years from now and like, I can't believe they had that much. But we'll also all look back and be like, I can't believe I secured that 10 Bitcoin or 100 Bitcoin on Michael Tanguma (01:18:21.577) USB stick and then put the passphrase in my head or split it with my you know cousin when I pass that we're gonna put it all back together it's just gonna be a wild thing and this is still super contrarian which is honestly very amazing because once we talk with somebody and walk them through this it's very clear we've thought very deeply about it. Jackson Mikalic (01:18:42.534) Yeah, yeah, I think that inheritance piece is big too because what people, what effectively exists for most people is a treasure map. I actually spoke with someone yesterday who showed me a book. It might have been called Crypto Asset Inheritance Planning or something. That was published five years ago. And I was explaining, we were talking about treasure maps, right? And this guy, Larry goes to his bookshelf, pulls a book off the shelf and says, this book, effectively recommends people to put together a treasure map for their asset. And so again, this is like published maybe five years ago. I didn't look at the book. I don't know anything beyond the title of it. But this is what people do. They set up treasure maps and they pray to God that their family figures it out. Maybe they show their wife, you know, this is what this does. It literally looks like a toy though, right? Going back to you're holding this thing in your hand. It doesn't feel real. And then if someone You show it to your wife. I've showed the seed fray. We've done that with my wife before. If I die, anything I hold in self custody, which is becoming a smaller smaller amount with time, I just don't feel confident that she'll get it. Because it's not like she's like, yeah, let's go try to plug in the signing device. Let's sign a transaction. let's take a look. These things, you talk through it and you hope to have a plan, but There's actually no plan. You talk about it one time or you talk about it a couple times. It's not a plan. And so that's another thing just to show how early we are. The thing that really frustrates me, if you can't tell, is that everyone loves to talk about how early we are in Bitcoin, but there's actually very little serious discourse about what the implications of that are. So if you go on Twitter, that's why I barely go on Twitter, I barely post anymore, is because it's just everyone bullying each other up about why the price will be this and that. But there's no actually deeper level thinking beyond that. If we're serious people, I don't want to consider myself serious in some regard. I don't want to be too serious. But we actually need to have solutions that will help people to manage this. And it's just a shame that people just want to talk about the price and not actually build solutions that will help people secure it or at least help themselves secure it. That's priority number one. Brian Cubellis (01:21:09.249) Yeah, or even just like, make a good point in that it's like, people want to bull post, they want to say we're early, but they don't want to think through the actual like ramifications of what that future state looks like. And that's, you know, a lot of what we're doing at OnRamp and, and, you know, with multi-institution and all the financial services that we can provide, like we are planning for that future state where not only is the asset appreciated a ton, so you don't necessarily want that, that burden of private key management in your house or on your loved ones. But you also wanna tap into financial services in a seamless way. Like, Michael, I think you do a really good job of highlighting this. It's like, you can't tap into financial services if every time you need to access the coin, you've gotta like go in your cave, follow the treasure map, like do all these things. Like one, it's extremely, that's like a ton of friction. And two, every time you do that, every time you go in to, you conduct whatever financial service you want to do, touch the Bitcoin, like you're exposing the attack factor in that moment, right? And so it's like, that doesn't make a lot of sense to do that in perpetuity, basically. Michael Tanguma (01:22:19.031) Yeah, yeah, well, we've gone hard on this, I mean, confidently, and this will play out over years, that any financial product in Bitcoin will be built better backwards and forwards on multi-institution custody, whether it's trade, insurance, lending, inheritance, and then companies as well. It's a different conversation, but if a company is ultimately just sending out their clients, they have to figure it out, or hopefully don't get their finger sent back. if they get kidnapped is not gonna win in the space long term because others are just gonna out compete them with better solutions for their clients and they'll recognize it. But to take just like one other note is we don't even have to talk about individuals like. This is where I always get concerned with the public traded companies and I got, we got our friendly MSTR bull here at Tim. So I've got to tread lightly, but it's like, if I was in MSTR, I would always be underwriting with that position of like, they have a single custodian or two that hold all those assets. So any value from a share is derived from the safeguarding of that asset and nothing's bulletproof from a single custodial perspective. And for 15 years, all we've had is things that aren't bullshitting. I like to use analogy if you put all the logos of the custodians or exchanges from the past 15 years and blindfolded yourself and through a dart you've more than likely hit one that doesn't exist and lost all their clients funds and we just somehow keep forgetting that and so think there's just like a lot of things that the market still has to get educated on that's why it ties back to Brian like the dominant stuff, it's just like, I wish, I hope you're right on there, it's just like everything we've seen, you know, these concepts are still so novel from a hardcore Bitcoiner, like understanding it, because they listen to a local influencer or podcaster, and so now that is a derivative of like institutional level, because those people work in institutions, it's just gonna take a while, because the opposite is like Coinbase, or BNY Mellon, right? Michael Tanguma (01:24:16.621) Which is great, it's a great opportunity for anybody that resonates with whether you're interested in our services or building a business around multi-institutionally. We have a lot of plans to build the future infrastructure that actually to Jackson's point mitigates a lot of these concerns and builds better products. So it's an amazing set to where Tim is at. Like he saw 15 years from 11 to now of probably a lot of people that were very wealthy that understood what was happening and had a vision and conviction on the direction it was gonna go. But along the way, a lot of people probably went bankrupt and ended up in different industries. Because the earlier you are, the more tinkers and jokers you have in an industry. I think that's what we've seen. And that makes sense, because the first 15 years of the internet, we're ripe with that as Tim Kotzman (01:24:56.886) Yeah, I think I actually have a notion that you'll see corporates think a CFO think a controller that will innately have an appreciation for multi-institutional custody because they have similar protocols in place at the corporate level. You have to have two separate people or at least two different user IDs where you log in and you go through the process before you initiate a wire, for example. Right? Even in my business, there's two different user IDs that need to be need to confirm a transaction before a batch of an ACH or a wire would go out on the corporate level. So maybe there'll be an appreciation for that more on the corporate side. And then on the individual side, some people will understand and appreciate it. Others will think of it as a novel thing. Others will come in from the security safety standpoint. But I don't think it's a natural thing. If I was... not in the financial industry, I might not have any appreciation for some of this because I would just think, well, JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail, so I'm fine. And even if we say that that's true, if there's a better solution for the same cost, so to speak, why would you not consider that? So I think it'd be interesting to see the different buckets of adoption and how they play out. Michael Tanguma (01:26:37.677) And that's where the Wall Street thing's gonna get really messy because we've seen institutions fail, we've seen the GFC, the problem is those all get kind of tapered or plastered over because of you can print more money, you can bail out, you can't make any more Bitcoin. And so that's gonna be the hard lesson we're gonna learn. And a lot of these concepts we talk about because we experienced them like specifically around BlockFi because they were backed by Peter Thiel and obviously they're nowhere at the level of a big bank, but it's still the same concept of the math. It's the math like when an institution loses their shirts, loses the Bitcoiners off sides on leverage, at a certain point the shareholders don't bail them out. There's no equity left. There's nothing left to do that. And that's the dirty secret of like, well, should we get it involved in Bitcoin? We love you. Brian Cubellis (01:27:28.471) Best case scenario, you get the dollars back, right? They print dollars and they give you dollars back at some point. But that's the best case scenario. Michael Tanguma (01:27:36.109) Best, yeah. Which is, yeah. Which is a funny, not a funny thing, but that's something that comes up a lot of all this bankruptcy. The bankruptcies the past three years, just what's happened since 21 and 22. Folks, look at that page we pulled up. We have part of our deck about the $655 billion in losses and there's all these logos and they just kind of point. like, yep, I was part of BlockFi. Yep, I was there. Yeah, it's gonna be an interesting next 24 months. Jackson Mikalic (01:28:07.568) Yes it will. Alright guys, let's get back to it. Good rip this week. Higher, right Tim? Are we going higher? Alright. Tim Kotzman (01:28:18.722) Higher. Thanks, gentlemen. Jackson Mikalic (01:28:19.729) Alright, thanks guys. Michael Tanguma (01:28:20.951) Yep. Brian Cubellis (01:28:21.399) Thanks boys, good stuff.