Introducing Bitcoin for Businesses: The Supercycle Catalyst

All right, welcome to the world premiere episode one of the Bitcoin for Businesses podcast, Move Over Cartoons, because we've got your favorite Saturday morning show right here. So, tune in each week as this amazing cast that I'm about to introduce covers the week's breaking news in Bitcoin and business. And the whole goal here is for us to help guide operators through Bitcoin's adoption as a core savings technology for your corporate treasury. So, we're going to be covering breaking news, best practices, and most importantly, why this disruptive asset class presents an asymmetric opportunity for those of you listening to this podcast that are in the know. So, introducing our co-host and then I know Michael here is going to want to say a few more words about the the purpose of this podcast, but Michael Tanguma here is the founder and CEO at On-Ramp, which is a Bitcoin asset management platform built on multi-institution custody. He's also a partner at Early Riders, a Bitcoin denominated venture firm. Liam Niss, or sorry, not Liam Niss, but that's kind of funny. Liam Nelson is also a partner at Early Riders and has a background in private equity. And Matt Ball has been contributing to the Bitcoin space for years and recently went full-time into Bitcoin, joining as head of design at On-Ramp and head of product at my company, Acropolis. I'm your host Chase Palmieri and I'm the co-founder and CEO at Acropolis which is a sister company to on-ramp and one of the funded portfolio companies of Early Riders and Acropolis is pioneering the world's first Bitcoin treasury platform built on multi-institution custody. Guys, great to have you in here for episode one and and Michael, I know you wanted to say a little bit more. Well, I just first have to say mic dropped because Chase, if that opening was indicative of your hosting skills, uh, you're going to absolutely crush this and excited to be here. Also excited for a Saturday morning rip. I used to listen to Musco on with Epilo from Block Works and it was always a nice one, especially in the summers when it's a little quiet. But yeah, as Chase alluded to, I think where I'm really excited about this and I think us as a group really stems from two functions. One is my previous royal building Unchained. I uh really felt the pain and the gap in the market for serious businesses that were allocating to BTC that knew they needed to get their keys off of an exchange, but they ultimately couldn't get their board, their shareholders and fiduciary, anybody managing other people's capital comfortable with private keys, seed phrases and everything under the sun. And that's really where multi-institution really stemmed from start was just the reality that uh there was a need in the market and then naturally on stepped in and then obviously Acropolis is filling the gap on the corporate and you know SMB side of things. Um so that's really the excitement part but also around the notion that there's a lack of we know enterprises and businesses are adopting Bitcoin at a feverish pace but around the implementation and best practices just aren't being discussed. uh you hear a lot of concepts across the board we'll be talking about week after week. So that's kind of like on the the genesis of a lot of this but the other side of it is really rooted in pragmatism is businesses of all shapes and sizes are suffering from inflation. Um I'm sure Chase you've talked about this before but your family you know working in the service industry and I'm sure they see it. You know when you think about my wife's in the hospitality industry and they see the inputs and outputs of inflation. They really impact every business from individuals all the way to the biggest businesses and every business will ultimately need Bitcoin if they're going to survive in this future world of where inflation runs rampant or increases. And so it's just a paramount uh focus for the market to grow, but education, goods, services to be able to be distributed and discussed. And it's kind of a crazy thing because just how multi institutions wild that it didn't exist and really the ones that you know really pioneer it. Very similarly, it's kind of weird that there's not a Bitcoin for businesses podcast. And so naturally what I found in being in Bitcoin for the time I have is if you have a good idea, it's usually probably a really good idea and you should act on it. And so really excited for us to be here and every everyone else to join from this group to commit the time, but then also the listeners and hopefully you can like, subscribe, share and uh tune in. We'll do it bi-weekly to start, but depending on how much interest there is, maybe we'll we'll shift to weekly and uh you know extend ourselves even further in this whole ecosystem. >> Yeah. And Liam, did you want to say a couple words? Just say hello to everybody, introduce yourself maybe a touch more. >> Yes, super excited to be here. Thanks again for having us. I think we're in really early stages and there are a lot of people who are on both sides of things who think that everybody needs to go 100% in on Bitcoin and uh you know just try to kill fiat as fast as possible and that's should be the sole focus of their business. as well as on the other side there is the uh idea that people should have no I no Bitcoin exposure at all or not even be thinking about it from a business perspective and the reality is honestly somewhere in the middle where people need to actually run a successful business otherwise they should just shut it down and you know buy Bitcoin with it but the reality is Bitcoin is one tool in a massive toolkit that businesses really have in order to create better outcomes for themselves and that's kind of what we're here to talk about week in and and week out. >> Yeah. And it's not an easy tool to know how it fits into HR versus treasury and all the different kind of functions in a company. But Matt, you've been working full-time in Bitcoin now. You know, you've been behind the scenes with a lot of interesting Bitcoin projects, but full-time now for like a week. How are you doing? >> Doing well. It's a it's a blessing to be able to work with uh with this team and super excited to to be on this pod and kind of cut through some of the noise in the in the sort of Bitcoin for business space right now and kind of deliver that signal. So, I think it's a great opportunity and really excited to to rip with you guys bi-weekly for the foreseeable future. >> All right, great. The pleasantries are out of the way. Let's get into the signal. Um, I'll go ahead and kick things off with one of the topics that I brought to the show today, which is the fact that this week Letin got rid of all of their cryptobacked loans and decided that they're going to focus on Bitcoin only loans. Uh, to date their their book was already 98% Bitcoin. You can imagine that as Bitcoin becomes, you know, greater market share in the crypto space in general, this was kind of always going to be the path that the asset class went down. It was always going to make up the majority of capital for any of these projects, platforms, exchanges that do crypto plus Bitcoin. But really interesting to see a company that has been dabbling in ETHback loans and other cryptoback loans kind of pull back and say, "No, you know what? our clientele wants us to be focused on Bitcoin only. It's a simpler business to execute on when we can focus on just one asset class and uh and so it's 98% of our books anyway. And so they've gone exclusively to Bitcoin only. I'm curious, Michael, do you think that this is something that we're going to see a lot of other companies that have kind of dabbled in crypto more broadly pull back and get back to Bitcoin only roots or is this maybe a one-off because of the lending space and the nuances there? Yeah, I think it's um it's a great question and kind of a symptom of time in the market because historically and it's still the case. It's very hard to raise capital from traditional venture capitalists and having a singular view in Bitcoin only. It's still today, let alone you go back 5 years and it's kind of my journey into getting into venture and and really the early writers uh theme as well. But what what I think happens is it's actually the most pragmatic and rational thing to do. But whether it's the entrepreneur not really fully groing that it's Bitcoin as a signal or having to offer other services because you have to raise capital it brings out uh lack of focus and that's why you see exchanges there's no shortage of exchanges and proliferation of even like you think about ETF flows are drastically disproportionate of BTC but something like Bitwise focuses on everything under the sun. What I think ultimately happens and we've seen this is if you have that lack of focus that means you know you're obviously having trade-offs in your core business and the flows are in every respect denominated in BTC whether it's custody trading revenue clientele interest and what happens is most companies we've seen especially in the lending space have blown themselves up because they necessarily don't even understand counterparty risk the custody aspect and then also are dealing in the long tail of altcoins and what you generally are seeing And this is an example of once you get to the other side of it, you're like, why am I doing this to myself? Because you naturally have this attack surface, whether it's having to manage custodial assets on the longtail of crypto or you have to think about the volatility and just inherent kind of like centralization and the moving and manipulating of markets that I think if you're long enough like let in to stay alive, it's the rational outcome to say, well, like maybe I should just focus on the thing and that just makes you a more efficient business. So, I think that's kind of like the trajectory with the one caveat that as the market gets more uh sophisticated, you'll just see more capital and funding for just Bitcoin related uh businesses because it's just the the prudent thing to do if you're a business owner or a capital allocator. >> Yeah, I agree. Especially I mean Letin's business model is Bitcoin loans or crypto loans uh in the past and you know you want to have loans on the best performing asset that actually has gone up over time because otherwise you would just sell it because you and take the capital gains hit rather than taking a loan out against it and Bitcoin has appreciated more than others. Not to say that many others haven't done extremely well over different time frames, but especially recently, Bitcoin has outperformed most others other than maybe past month or two. So, it just makes sense to focus there from a a you know, only limited bandwidth perspective with the respect of, you know, Bitcoin only businesses. I I maybe don't necessarily agree that all, you know, consumerf facing businesses will be Bitcoin only. I think uh Bitcoin and digital assets have been necessarily grouped together because the industries had to be kind of pirates or operate with maybe vague um laws around them rather than having clear rules of the road. And I think in the future you're you're more likely to see Bitcoin uh grouped in with like just typical stocks, other financial assets that people typically have versus Bitcoin and ETH, Doge, Salana, whatever. Bartcoin under the sun. It just makes more sense because people want a unified experience when just when they buy their assets just like a Robin Hood or whatever it is. Unless with the cav caveat that I'll make unless you're providing infrastructure like sub custody for a bank or or something like that is when you can offer Bitcoin only financial services unless you want to be kind of a niche player in the market which can can certainly happen and kind of be a niche player that continues to be profitable but I just don't think that's necessarily how the majority of people want to interact with financial services. >> I guess Matt kind of teeing it up for you here. We see a lot of Bitcoiners. We know a lot of Bitcoin maxis, they really only want to use products and services that speak to that Bitcoin only use case, they really don't want to use a service that's meddling in these other things. So, if you're really going to capture the Bitcoin market share and those hardcore Bitcoiners, you kind of do need to commit to not dabbling in the other stuff. So honestly, from maybe just a market share perspective, it's almost a good call to go Bitcoin only because it's only incremental dollars in the crypto side and it adds a ton of confusion. So what do you think about this idea of, you know, businesses that have been doing crypto doing Bitcoin only? >> Yeah, I think I think this is a great case study here. I mean, they've they came to market with just crypto. they were offering Ethereum loans and Bitcoin loans and then sort of their their customer base their users kind of informed their next pivot from that. So they I mean 98% of the loans were allocated were backed by Bitcoin. The rest were 2% Ethereum. So that sort of was a an opportunity for them to make a pivot. And I think it's I think it's as a Bitcoiner, it's more when you have an offering that is Bitcoin only because then you can assume and safely assume that the the team that's building that product is wary of the the added sort of security vector attacks that might arise if offering other crypto sort of strategies or products themselves. I think I don't I don't discount London for sort of coming out with the crypto first, but I love the fact that they've pivoted from this and that they've seen the allocation that their and customers were making and decided just to go Bitcoin only here, which I think is a is a valiant sort of pivot and shift from their original introduction. >> Yeah, I think you know you've obviously seen a value in being Bitcoin only in your own career. I can see a lot of enterprises seeing value in being Bitcoin only for that level of focus as well. So, next topic that Michael, you brought to the table here. It's really an eyepopping number. The top 100 public Bitcoin treasury companies now hold over a million BTC. That's quite a bag in the hands of Bitcoin treasury companies. Where did you want to go with that? Yeah, I think um brought that mainly because of the I could have never forecast um and this is kind of the stemming of this show and also the um we'll be seeing you know with some of the announcement with with folks joining and different products launching for the enterprise sector of the market the amount of error cover that has existed for businesses of all shapes and sizes to now figure out their Bitcoin treasury strategy because ultimately what has effectively inhibited most individuals and all the way up the institutions of corporations is the stigma around Bitcoin. It's why Bitcoin has generally been adopted by individuals because there are consensus of one. You don't necessarily need to get governance, right? And maybe outside of your wife to, you know, ape in or whatever. And but the reality is there's a lot of Bitcoin investors that own businesses and whether it's getting their board approval or just feeling, you know, comfortable with talking about it and this notion of it's in the zeitgeist now. You know, you have what's happening with the digital asset treasury companies, but more importantly, you have not only ETFs, but the the notion of over the top 100 publicly traded companies hold over a million dollars, a million BTC, that there's error cover now for businesses to start adopting, you know, Bitcoin. And that's where I thought was like the signal through a lot of this is that the cat's out of the bag. And now we're just naturally going to slowly see companies not only allocate from balance sheet capital but think thinking about long-term cash flows into BTC. I don't necessarily think it's for the some are doing it for the reasons of like it's the the trade and and there's we see a lot of you know natural leverage that wants to get inserted into the system but I think that there's also just the um aperture opening of well what is this thing Bitcoin? Oh, is this a better savings technology for my business to outpace what's happening from an inflation perspective? That is a trend that's going to continue to grow. >> Yeah. And I know I've looked it up and I think only about 10 of those 100 public Bitcoin treasury companies actually have a profitable operating business. So, we may still see some of those coins come back to market over time. Liam, I know that's something you're pretty passionate about is kind of having a profitable underlying operating business as well. Yeah, I think um well to that point as well, I think that some of those are probably mining companies too that you know sometimes do make a profit on paper and then the free cash flows inevitably that the business just gets more pro um challenging over time. But yeah, I mean to that point um you know we saw Tesla adopt Bitcoin in uh 2021 and thought that there would be more sign come significantly after that just given um you know how people view Elon as uh kind of a leader in that space and it just naturally made sense. But I really am excited about Figma um and and to your point Michael it's just more so $90 million worth of Bitcoin. They're obviously not going nearly all in for how big the overall size of the business is, but they're the ETFs give them a significant amount of cover too because it's essentially a professionalized solution for them to get into where in the past they didn't know which way they should go if it's going to be if they go with Coinbase or whoever else under the sun if they're really is going to be their Bitcoin at the end of the day. and they can have more certainty signing off that their board actually did or that Black Rockck did the due diligence on Coinbase and how everything is custodied and managed there. And not to say that it's a perfect solution at all, but it certainly brings air cover to the uh Figmas of the world who want to just get like a a relatively small allocation and you know use that as a way in order to help them just diversify their treasury for their core operating business. The Figma thing is absolutely fascinating because um you know in tech when you generally hear or this is in general business where you follow the talent and the talent kind of that's where the industry where people are going it reminds me of where um SWIB Wisconsin's um I believe it's is it pension was it yeah swib their pension system uh allocated to BTC and when you went and looked at their performance against all other pensions they were in the top tier they have a very unique governance structure when it comes to their investment committee that actually generates revenue like from a personal perspective if they outperform so it lines incentives perfectly and it reminded me of um that's following the talent in the same way where if you look at Figma's balance sheet it's absolutely incredible from like they're I believe have been in the black for a while from a profitable profitability perspective but then also like they almost it's not run like a hedge fund in the porative sense it's run like a hedge fund in the sense like they're managing their balance sheet in a very productive way when it comes to the different cash equivalents that they store and the amount of BTC they've been holding and it's not for playing on their stock price or a mimedic or marketing scheme. It's just they've been allocating and increasing their allocation which is again following that uh talent. >> Yeah. And we didn't know that they had the Bitcoin until they came public. I mean that's how much they weren't using it as a marketing ploy. It was really just discovered quietly from people looking through S1's. Matt, any take on a million Bitcoin held by public treasuries right now? >> Uh yeah, I think that's I mean incredible incredible opportunity as a as a Figma user myself. I think it's it's cool to see like the these companies in San Francisco and tech companies pick these up. I know the Figma founder specifically was a little crypto curious around like the 2018 time frame and so obviously he kind of went down that path and decided to allocate to to Bitcoin which is a very exciting very exciting event. >> Yeah. And just to put a finer point on all this too is the air cover of these 1 million Bitcoin that all these public companies have. It's it couldn't really happen without uh the change in accounting rules back in 2024 as well, which is just also given additional air cover and just the the amount of different boxes that people need to check in order to get Bitcoin on their balance sheet between getting all the everybody on the corporate board understanding what Bitcoin actually is, why they should own some, uh how to custody it, how to manage it from an accounting perspective, um how to get all of their employees on board that they're not just gambling away the money on their balance sheet and they'll they won't be able to pay the employees at the payroll next week. It's it really couldn't have happened without I think that was a big impetus the accounting change too. >> Definitely. And Liam, you had another story here around the New York-based Inversion Labs and their plans to acquire low margin companies and outfit them with blockchain to juice efficiency and then reap the profits that follow. What uh what about that story was interesting. >> Yeah, I thought that Mike would like that a lot. It's essentially I mean there there's going to be a lot of transformative companies at this time that just figure out essentially marginal ways to really reduce the the cost of the business which will directly translate to profits. But at the same time, I don't necessarily think that a massive overhaul with the having private equity focused just to uh essentially run stable coins through a business is is going to be a massive profit center and and really juice the um you know actual profit margins for them to outfit them and then sell later on. And so I have a lot of uh a lot of hesitations and reservations around if this will actually be successful. But you know just with all the noise in the market right now I thought it was super uh relevant to share. >> I think >> maybe teeing you up Michael one thing that's interesting about inflation and how it affects businesses is how it shrinks their margins. I don't think people who just experience inflation in their everyday life kind of understand that that's the downstream kind of waterfall that results in shrinking margins. Can you maybe touch on that as well when you you kind of touch on what Liam was saying? >> Yeah, I'll I'll touch on Liam's and I think the what you're referring to kind of ties into the um we'll pull up the uh businesses the number of businesses that have gone out because that that'll kind of like correlate to um kind of the fundamentals being dislocated. I think the thing that Liam shared, what I want to touch on and I think doesn't get discussed enough is um the the play today for businesses is really the buy and hold. The market has not developed and this is objectively not subjectively like the market has not developed around yield generation in Bitcoin. For 15 years, people have promised and tried to do it and they've blown themselves up. Um, there's probably some small niche hedge funds or market makers that can do it, but at a very small scale, it's really hard as you increase the amount of Bitcoin you're holding or just dollars in general to hit the return profile or benchmark. Why I bring that up is because that's a common narrative that's coming together. It's on the most innocent side. If you figure out the trade, just custody it. Don't get, you know, thrown into the loop of how do you generate more, you know, incremental yield on the BTC. But it's also thrown around a lot with the version I think the 2.0 version narrative of DAT and and what will come is well we're going to accumulate a war chest and then we're going to go allocate it to get Bitcoin denominated financial services to generate yield and it's a really great story and I would encourage anybody that listens to you know this is kind of the difference and I think some of this the thoughts we'll be sharing is for 15 years nobody's been able to do this without blowing themselves up and so I don't think that in a long enough time horizon Bitcoin as a financial asset you will be able to monetize it and do other things with it but we're so early that the market actually hasn't coalesed and figured out a somewhat risk-free rate of return. And so that's really the the call out there is I think there was a lot of language or marketing spin of how they're going to generate some incremental yield to bring that back. And you're going to see this with the digital asset treasury companies on the um staking side because everyone loves passive yield and income and so that's how they're going to wrap around the innovation and go buy my you know debt versus the underlying. Um, so that's kind of what I my take away from that was is just that there's going to be no shortage of marketing schemes that we're going to generate more Bitcoin, but it's never been done. Actually, it's not even a subjective thing. It's just never been done, especially at a scale that we're talking about. And the last part is to go in and step in to do it is pretty much impossible to do because we saw this happen in 21 and 22 is when you first step into the market unless you're insanely conservative and we could talk about some of the practices there maybe later on the show or future shows is that generally people put the mental models of traditional finance as they enter Bitcoin and it's a different game because when you think about 24/7 markets volatility um rehypothecation there's no lender of last resort so you get caught naked in this asset class and that's how you get blown up and that's why so many people have gone away that you just got to be very careful if your business is going to put any of this capital at risk. >> Yeah. I mean at Early Riders we've seen a bunch of these decks and etc that just I mean not even that that we would take them seriously but just from the amount of capital that they're able to raise uh and it's just literally mindboggling that uh so many people can really be interested in this. It's in in Bitcoin. It specifically there is you don't want to be on the cutting edge of your savings and putting your savings to work. You you actually want to there's a lot of value to being very kind of slow, methodical, using tried and uh best practices that are actually tried and true, etc., rather than trying to figure out something new, especially when you have a significant amount of capital on the line. And so anytime that somebody pitches you something too good to be true, it it honestly probably is. And that should be the best practice of how you think about the industry as a whole. >> Yeah. I'm thinking how many of that 1 million BTC that are being held by the pubos are taking single counterparty risk right now? Probably most of it. >> Yeah, that's exactly right. >> Matt, any words on those topics there? shrinking margins, inflation affecting businesses, chasing yield with your Bitcoin instead of just, you know, sitting on the performance at a time when we're just going up the S-curve of adoption. >> I think you I think you covered it well right there. I think you guys highlighted the main the >> I think um if we want to go to the the inflation and uh margin compression. So there was an article that came out. This was from Zero Hedge, but they were citing Newsweek, which uh the title was large US companies are going bankrupt at the fastest pace since the global financial crisis. And it shows according to Newsweek 446 large companies filed for bankruptcy during the first seven months of this year. And you know if we can encapsulate what the purpose of Bitcoin for business is the show and in general Bitcoin is the notion of um it comes at it from multiple facets but I guess that the two sides of it is from an individual perspective to a business or a sovereign when you um dis dislocate or uh mess with the signals that underlying uh economics or distort the money supply and the cost of it that cost of capital. It makes it very hard to plan in capex, opex and investments in your business. And so we've seen this whipsaw back and forth for you know you know frankly 30 to 50 years but really just look at 20 post 2020 when 2021 everyone understands kind of that was like the peak craze in traditional VC and kind of capital dislocation. everybody was, you know, getting the raises that the valuations. Um, but then ultimately as the Fed whipssawed and started to raise interest rates, businesses became incredibly non uh the economics didn't make sense. And so there was another example about four weeks ago came out open store which was an aggregator uh raised at I think its peak a billion dollar valuation by really big venture funds. Founders I believe and Keith Ro is the CEO. They recently had to do a down round at le I think $50 million valuation because the business just didn't fundamentally make sense. That's what happens when you distort uh the cost of capital. On the other side of that is structurally given the amount of debt it is structural it's structurally impossible not to increase the number of monetary units because the entire system would delever. And once somebody understands that well then they understand that inflation only picks up at an accelerated pace. That's what has happened happened empirically over the past 10 plus years, but specifically the past 5 years postco. But to what Chase asked earlier, inflation doesn't happen in a vacuum. Meaning as the goods and services rise, if you're a business and it costs more, whether it's the cost for your employees or the the cost of your inputs, if you're uh you know, whether it's you're building a house or if you're a um hospitality group in a restaurant and everything that goes into the ingredients costs more. Well, now you have to make a decision. Do you raise your prices or do you keep them constant? If you keep them constant, well, now you're having margin compression because your constant prices, there's a gap between what you had to pay for the inputs. If you raise the prices, well, then that naturally to keep up with inflation. Well, that's really where two things happen. You're lowering the amount of revenue because it's not in a vacuum. Again, just because you raise the prices doesn't mean the same number of people are going to continue to buy the goods and services. And this is something everyone probably feels and maybe can't put a finger on it, but there's been a visceral degradation in the uh client services, the product. Everything we touch and feel feels a little off whether it's the amount of like call in the you know airline and you got to like you know just either if they even if you can even get them on the phone it's like who are you talking to? um but ultimately in goods and services across the board and this is is like a cousin of shrinkflation right and so I think that's a really big this is where so you add all that together and you see again the largest number of bankruptcy since the '08 crisis and this ties into what uh Matt Bow and we were talking about with Figma at the end of the day like there's a lot of ways to slice this one of them is in the same way it'd be crazy for a business not to adopt SAS or adopt AI it's just like upgrading ing your tech stack, it's going to be looked at in the same vein is if you don't upgrade your savings technology where you're just going to get out competed away. I think is this is indicative of that. We're still in the early innings. I don't think most pubos are actually buying Bitcoin for this reason. I think this happens at the traditional SMB midmarket place where people are upgrading, you know, their bit their their savings stack. But we're still early and as inflation runs and the Bitcoin price runs and podcasts like this and the tools and services like multi-institution to make it easy for a company to aggregate material amounts and not be worried about a single custodian or holding you know hardware devices. Uh we will see this you know industry and specifically businesses adopting Bitcoin. >> Yeah. I mean if you look at just my family restaurant to your point when inputs go up you either have to decide are we going to put less pasta on the plate? Are we going to downgrade the quality of the ingredients or are we going to charge our clients more? But you can't just hold constant because you know otherwise you're taking on that additional cost. One other thing that we're seeing now, we we saw the rate hiking cycle. Now it looks like we're going to see the beginning of rate cuts, which is still a manipulation in the price of money and and the cost of capital. But it's uh it's somewhat predictable to think that the $7 trillion or so, that's rough estimates this week, of money that's sitting in money market funds, once those rates drop, that they might start looking around for a better performing asset that does a better job of keeping pace with true inflation, not just CPA. Do you think, you know, this is for anybody here, do do you think that that 7 trillion trapped in money markets today is going to start looking at Bitcoin or are we still too early to see it choosing that asset class? >> Yeah, I mean, you can't help but feel that as interest rates go, everyone's going to get further out on the risk curve. So, I think you you will see that. I think your main point this was a big aha moment and during co there was like a a local Mexican restaurant taco shop and it was super innocent but like they had a board with the prices of tacos and it were all market priced you know they had like it was like if you were going to a butcher or like a fish place like it was all tape over it. This is this is tacos right like a taco in Texas cost a buck 50 or whatever. And I just had this visceral feeling of, oh god, like not only do they need Bitcoin, but if they adopt Bitcoin and the taco shop across the street doesn't, it gives you, and this is really the crux of like adopting a Bitcoin uh treasury, is it gives you optionality on well, you can not have to increase the price because you're, you know, your treasury, your savings is increasing at the rate, if not faster than inflation. So you can keep pace and again inflation has not been a vacuum. So your competitor is having to increase the prices, lower the quality of service while you're not having to do that. And that's the thing that I think happens at an independent level is it's all Darwinistic, right? It's like if you don't protect yourself, well then you're going to have less to be able to spend on what you want. The same way businesses are eat or be eaten. There's a great book Hard Bowl. Are you playing to play? Are you playing to win? And the whole objective, it's a it's a moral imperative for a business to to win because that's how productivity grows. That's how society grows. And so the businesses that are playing to win are going to adopt BTC. They're going to have better goods and services and they're going to out compete and end up purchasing their competitors or their competitors are just going to go out of business. Yeah, I think that's a great point and one thing that I haven't really thought about quite as hard as I need to, but it's just the idea of having all of your suppliers and customers adopt Bitcoin as well because over time, you know, if as long as your competitor doesn't adopt it as the same rate as you over time, they're going to have more optionality to reinvest in their manufacturing facilities, the product to increase the um what the actual core inputs are to whatever you're producing. And then over time your suppliers will have more time to um you know actually buy more of your products and services, reinvest in you too. And so it's a it's a weird game where you actually don't want your competitor to adopt Bitcoin, but you really want all of uh you know your customers and suppliers to adopt Bitcoin as well. And so while there there is something to being open in the market about you know actually adopting Bitcoin even as a private business too. >> Hey guys, a quick word from early riders. If you like concepts like Bitcoin is a hurdle rate, as well as following along with everything across Bitcoin infrastructure, Bitcoin startups today, I highly recommend you check out Early Riders and everything that we're doing there. We're putting out a ton of research, so please subscribe at early riders.com/ressearch and please reach out if you're ever interested in how to get involved. Thanks. Yeah, I think we talk about Bitcoin on the balance sheet in a very defensive way a lot of times, like guard yourself against monetary debasement, protect yourself from margin compression, but Michael and Liam, to your guys' points, it is an offensive strategy as well, because if you don't have to raise your prices, you can go out and capture more of market share. You know, there are there are a limited supply of dollars and customers in your sector. And if everyone around you has to raise their prices because they're not sitting on Bitcoin in the treasury and you can keep your prices constant or even potentially start to lower prices over time, even if on a kind of a input to production cost basis, it's net negative, but you're able to capture market share and your treasury is, you know, outperforming. So you're still experiencing that enterprise growth that you need to show investors, you're you're really able to kind of single-handedly start to gobble up a market. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean it goes back to the the the trope. I don't know who coined it, but the best defense is a good offense. And it just so happens to be, you know, Bitcoin is offensive and defensive. I think what Liam said um is interesting in the sense like I think you want everyone to adopt Bitcoin. That's the beauty of Bitcoin is it's not a zero sum game. And by notion of getting into Bitcoin, if your competitors are buying it, they're buying not your bags, but they're increasing the price theoretically. And then you just get back to competing on kind of just traditional business fundamentals. And the thing that this is really, you know, we'll see Chase and Matt Ball and even Liam TBD and who moves to Texas first. I think everyone eventually ends up there. But is why the focus has been in Texas very heavily and and Parker Lewis has really been leading that way from an early stage in understanding. You would talk about uh Venezuela as an example being one of the most oil richch countries in the world. But when their currency collapsed, they couldn't get the oil out of the ground because you couldn't coordinate economic activity. The truck stopped running, the employment, the drill stopped running because you don't have the ability to coordinate. And so there's something very important to what Liam was sharing about you want everyone around you also to benefit from this because you need them to be around because this is uh how economies work. We don't I don't I'm not the cattle driver. I don't produce the cow and I need my farmer to be able to accept my money and for something he understands in the same way a business supply chain and so there's something deeply uh important about kind of that full stack uh managing that or they're going to be kind of you're going to you end up in a place where you end up exposed if you want to be able to purchase goods and services and things you need the person went out of business >> 100% and the the core part of everything is the employees really make up the company and by adopting Bitcoin you're going to be able to you know increase the amount of your purchasing power which translates to everything just as like uh investing in capital expenses R&D whatever it may be under the sun and if you have more capital you have more capital to um attract the best people in the world and the best people in the world want to work at companies that are growing and so it becomes this self-re um like reinforcing flywheel of adopting Bitcoin allows you to get more money which allows you to get the best people and create the best products and services I Um, it's interesting. Yeah, you want Bitcoin for yourself, but you also want everybody in your industry to have it because then everybody in your industry is creating better products and services. Iron sharpens iron to Michael's point about your competitors adopting Bitcoin and and everybody around you too. And um, yeah, TBD on Texas. >> Yeah, TBD on Texas. I think it highlights a pretty big ethos point of Bitcoin in general. Like the whole Bitcoin is for enemies. Uh, it's can be sort of extrapolated to like Bitcoin is for competitors and in the business sense. I think you've both highlighted it well on sort of what that means. >> Yeah. One thing I want to ask Matt about this is kind of teasing because we didn't share on the top of the show, but part of the show will focus on kind of mainstream enterprise adoption and then a focus on some of the impacts from a business adopting BTC and then some of the innovation and opportunities that we will be developing, thinking about, investing in. And one of them that we've talked about behind closed doors is the notion of restricted Bitcoin units. uh aligning 401ks, right? Look, when you start thinking about a big part of any business in growth and winning is employee retention and and keeping the best people at your firm and historically equity, cash incentives, you know, specifically equity is very illquid and I think people are starting to get, you know, uh privy to that and they're not necessarily incentivized by that. I'm curious, Matt, specifically on your side, seeing what you've been in Silicon Valley, the notion of some of the interesting ideas we've talked about where a company can start to incentivize employees via Bitcoin employment programs, uh, matching programs where you can keep them longer. If you think that'll be an interesting trend in the future. >> Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. coming from recently coming from GE, which is like a Fortune 500 company now to living in the Silicon Valley area and seeing just a very different landscape of people. Like for example, at GE, we I would reach out to to finance executives pretty regularly and sort of get a pulse on their their stance on Bitcoin and their general sentiment. and even our 401ks and our retirement savings plan. We couldn't we we weren't allowed to self-direct or sort of allocate to even the basic ETF offerings. Uh which I think was a big it's it's a big sort of pulling back point for the employees, right? Like if you want to grant them that permission, that's certainly also sort of a freedom aspect as well when you're saving for retirement and you're able to sort of do with what you want with that money as you see fit. if there are limitations there, I think that can potentially be a big problem. Um, and and it's just very different here in Silicon Valley. I think there's much more appetite for that sort of self-direction and having that freedom of allocating to those that those new products such as ETFs and such. I think at Acropolis, we're trying to highlight that adding Bitcoin to your balance sheet is really just the first step and that once you do, you can do things with that Bitcoin like RBUs, you know, vesting Bitcoin to your employees, attracting, retaining talent. But another thing that I had on the docket today that I I think is interesting because I had on on the other pod on the Acropolis New Foundations pod last week, the co-founder of Arch Lending, uh, Bitcoin back loans platform. We really dug into this idea of an assetbacked loan versus a creditbacked loan. And we know there's a lot of companies out there that really struggle to get financing, a line of credit from a bank, etc. Once that Bitcoin's on your balance sheet, you can borrow against it for operational needs and you don't have a gatekeeper. You just need to post the Bitcoin as collateral and you can get that liquidity, you know, sometimes in hours. So maybe just kicking that over to you, Michael. Do do you think this idea of having this assetbacked loan availability is a gamecher for small businesses or businesses with bad financials or in industries that don't easily get funding? >> Yeah, I I love that you brought this up. I wouldn't have had this opinion if I didn't have a conversation a few days ago with a client and uh you know, potentially on the early writer side. something that we look into from an investment perspective is what you just described. It was referencing we all have our like myopic or singular views and it's helpful to take a step back right from either where we come from or just different markets. And what you hit on was in Latin America the level of lending is insane. Like I didn't really recognize that it costs anywhere between 25 to 35% like uh interest rate on like a business loan and taking out you know any kind of to run your business. and he's looking at what does it look like down there. Um he's kind of thinking about that's a just in general how do you play the arbitrage if you have your own bitcoin and you can take that loan and then borrow out which is some execution risk right because you got to make sure the business has fundamentals to pay it back but to your point I can't speak directly to the US but I I can't imagine it wouldn't apply to anywhere specifically Latin America as a business starts to adopt and increase its savings into BTC it opens them up from capital growth or the opportunity to lend spend against it at a much lower nominal rate than the current market rate in that country or region. And because of the proliferation of stable coins, you can get access in the dollarized world, you can be in any country, frankly, and get access to dollars backed by BTC. And so I think yeah, it makes complete sense that you will have this kind of growth of a market as individuals we see it, but also in businesses where you'll use it for operating capital. So yeah, I think it's spot on. Every business will hold Bitcoin. Some already do, others are developing a plan. Acropolis is how smart companies take action today. Built on multi-institution custody, Acropolis delivers a turnkey Bitcoin treasury solution designed specifically for businesses. Here's why that matters. Multi-institution custody is the breakthrough that unlocks the corporate adoption of Bitcoin. It eliminates the need for employees to hold private keys and removes reliance on any single custodian. Instead, Bitcoin is secured using a two of three multi- signature quorum where each key is held by a separate regulated institution. No single party can move funds on their own, eliminating single points of failure and greatly reducing risk. We act as an extension of your treasury team, managing institutional-grade custody, insurance, continuity planning, and strategic advisory so your company can adopt Bitcoin confidently and securely. If your company has been sitting on the sidelines, unsure of how to get started or worried about getting it wrong, this is your signal to reach out. Visit acropolis treasury.com and schedule a consultation with our team. Bitcoin is reshaping corporate finance. Don't get left behind. >> And you mentioned stable coins there, Michael. We've got some big news out of Tether coming to the US today. Should we dive into that? Yeah. So, the headline uh that came out earlier today was Bo Hines is now taking the CEO role of a new formed entity, which is I didn't fully read the whole thing. I guess I should I'm pretty confident this is right. It's a new entity and the new stable coin is like USA or something. Um >> USAT, I think. >> USAT. USA. Wow. That's that's pretty apt. Um, I think that why I call this out is it's very bullish for Bitcoin adoption globally, Bitcoin adoption in America, and then Bitcoin adoption in businesses, which is the the topic of this podcast, because of the simple version of there's still an inherent stigma of the digitization of money. We know it's digitized via credit card and all that, but it's still like what's a digital currency? Do I really want to park my value in it? And Bitcoin is a big leap. Like if we put ourselves back into, you know, pre, you know, adopting Bitcoin for your own personal balance sheet, this notion of magic internet beans and putting all our money is still a very foreign concept that I think as an industry we still don't fully know how to grapple with and and uh communicate. But the notion of digital dollars is pretty straightforward and especially for businesses when you think about remittances, crossborder, merchant and interchange fees and all of that is topic dour when you talk to banks and everyone. So you have this notion and Bohines literally coming from directly the government to go lead this is canoor canaring the coal mine that the market is going to embrace this tradfi and everyone across the board. Now, obviously, there's going to be a lot of speculation, a lot of losses. That's part of hopefully what we can help dispel here and add some clarity, but it's also going to drastically increase the flow of dollars into Bitcoin because now you're one click removed. And this is effectively what Tether pioneered, right? Tether, it was really circle consortium first, but it was the notion that they needed a pair to trade 24/7 because wires didn't work around Bitcoin. And this is that extension, but the order is of magnitude greater when it comes to just global liquidity into BTC. Yeah, Jack Mullers talks a lot about the USDC or the USDT and Bitcoin pair and that as the, you know, the float of stable coins increases, by definition, money is going to find its way into Bitcoin. I'm not sure I've totally groed how that works. If anybody here can kind of explain. Yeah, as you know, people just have access to more digital money, they're just going to hold more and more of it in Bitcoin because Bitcoin just goes up over time and Tether does not. It goes down over time because it's US dollar backed and so people are just going to want to save and something that makes more sense and they're just going to find more and more comfort with having digital dollars and there's there's probably not going to be a wallet with a seed phrase just like we have today. it's going to be all obuscated away with all of the different technology. But yeah, I think that people will just be more used to um interacting with money in this type of way and so going to Bitcoin won't seem nearly as crazy. >> Yeah, I think I think that's right. Maybe one piece missing is if you're already like the big gap is getting your analog dollars in the bank account or in your physical like you know cash account or under mattress into Coinbase or the exchange. you think about the wire and that's just kept a lot of people out. They want to generally buy from their bank and so whether it's your bank or Amazon because I think stable coins will probably forget across the world. We've seen uh what's happening with Stripe and Tempo. It's the reality that digital dollars are programmable and they can easily be swapped via almost any wallet in any infrastructure to get into Bitcoin is that big way that the flows happen is because you're taking out the multiple steps to get there. And so there's no shortage of ways that this could be uh implemented or happen. It'll be a confluence. But one easy example is if you have stable coins or BTC and different vendors like an Amazon or whatever has incentive to pay in BTC versus because that's what will happen, right? As Bitcoin grows, companies if they take the dollars have to go and buy the Bitcoin. So there's some nominal fee that happens there where it's more reasonable. And this is why stables and dollar uh uh and crypto working in parallel with bitcoin is just a misunderstanding of of of money and convergent and how it converges to one because it is a form of barter where naturally the business is going to incentivize or only accept BTC and then you have to make a decision and then it's how do I get the BTC and that's ultimately just a a function of time where more businesses will naturally incentivize you to pay in Bitcoin or only accept Bitcoin and then the the individual has to figure out how to do that. But if it's already in a digital form, it's very easy to to swap into >> 100%. It's just like nobody no businesses really accept checks nowadays because all of their competitors adopted better forms of money to accept payment with and thus uh the same thing is going to necessarily happen with both stable coins and Bitcoin. >> Yeah. And the chargebacks is a real issue for business owners. the idea that they can provide a service, a product, and then get charged back. And that doesn't happen when you use a final settlement asset like Bitcoin. Not to mention the fact that obviously, you know, over time, Bitcoiners as a demographic are becoming wealthier and have excess Bitcoin to spend, excess capital to spend, and are becoming a larger and larger market to try to advertise to. One thing we saw this week was iPhone releasing the I7 Pro in the Bitcoin orange. Uh to me that feels like a little bit of a intentional pander to the Bitcoin community, but I don't know if anybody else caught that. >> I think we're going to do a little better on referencing Bitcoin community and Bitcoiners. Uh we we need to discuss them as like rationalists. Like there's the old topic of servicing those individuals just going to be people that want to service their money because we have to get out of like part of this pod and in general is the notion of the ideology and the focus on having to do things a certain way has kept a lot of people out. So just cogn cognizant of that. The thing I will call out that's just a funny I'm curious your guys' take is it's never sat right with me and I think I stumbled on chargebacks I think are a fiat thing because the 2D response to stable coins Bitcoin payments is how do you do chargebacks in some form and I don't I'm not 100% certain on this I'm just thinking out loud but it reminds me very it's like a cousin of who will build the roads right it's like well we'll build the roads because you want to live in a good society and so we're going to figure that out because it's the right thing to do it's from a moral perspective in the same way. If you have a shitty product, you're going to give people the money back or you're going to go out of business. So, if like you have a charge back because the person didn't like the product or you did offer, you're going to figure out the right thing to do because your business longevity depends on it versus so like that's just an I'm thinking through it now, but I'm like wondering like scammers, how do you deal with that? But you see where I'm going with like chargebacks I think are a notion that's usually discussed when it comes to one-way flow of they don't offer that and then you're going to have to build other application layers that will allow for it but it feels like an inefficient process where theoretically it should be on the the guise of like the business to ultimately be able to to figure that out because if you're a good business you will honor and figure out the process for it. If you're a bad business you're going to go out of business if you're offering goods and services that people want their money back and you're not giving it to them. Yeah, I take your point that the best businesses, the most confident in their product or service often offer a 100% money back guarantee if you're dissatisfied with the product. So, yeah, I think you're right. If you if you really stand behind your product, chargebacks is probably a nominal, you know, frustration for your business. >> Go ahead. the the there was a a big aspect here this week of NameCheep selling $2 million domain for for at the at this point which was I think their biggest ever. They've done over $70 million in Bitcoin payments directly to the firm just eliminating the cost for the business as well as allowing people to pay in whichever asset they would like. This is definitely important just because or or their demographic likes it from a privacy perspective because not everybody necessarily wants their website to be known by other people. And so thus it's it's really important to actually understand your demographic and a customer to try to actually create what they really want rather than just saying here accept Bitcoin for something that's a little bit niche. And yeah, I thought that was exciting to see. I think that there will be more moving forward. There's just more and more willingness to use Bitcoin as money, but it really has to be for commercially viable uses. >> Yeah, I love that you called that one out because I think we lose a lot of sight in we will talk about it because it's a commercial thing to do and it will proliferate for a long time, stable coins, but the real reality is they lack a lot of the fundamental value and reasons where Bitcoin shines. And one of them is what we're talking about here. this notion of being able to move $2 million without any intermediary. And what was interesting is I believe they have their own BTC pay server. So they were they their fees were frankly I think nothing cuz it's open source. I don't know if there's any charge that they associate from BTC pay server. but take it into their own self-custody is a really like insane feat when you really extrapolate that you can move $2 million in economic value without any intermediary take it directly into your custody solution with no counterparty risk and given like the register I'm not an expert but the register and moving around domains it's almost like you need a a wire kind of process because you don't want to reverse that if somebody has a chargeback in that level and so to Liam's point it'll increasingly be at the like larger scale because they need that whether it's a gold you dealer needing to send a $2.5 million like you need something that's not reversible if you're going to send the physical gold um is just a very cool thing to see it I think over time as more users understand that and then scaling layers which will be fun to talk about um you know some of the stuff lights and implementations that they're doing in ecash like we're going to start to see the proliferation of uh you know sats and sats tied to BT uh dollars that will really uh create a lot of I think a like a renaissance on the internet that historically wasn't there when it just comes to sending a um bare asset online that isn't discussed enough. >> Yeah. And and specifically on the name sheep example, I mean this company is a 100% privatelyowned company. They actually released this BTC payer integration exactly five almost exactly 5 years ago today. And so this has just been something that they've offered and they've kind of been slowly accepting Bitcoin as a payment as a part of their domain just all of their domain services and and now we see headlines coming out about these big these large transactions that will be coming in and that that will just continue to happen. And NameCheep is a shout out NameCheep. They're a great a great company. Yeah. And excited to see that they're fully doing the BTC pay server stuff. >> Yeah. I think uh I think we should go around and do final thoughts from everybody just so we could keep it within the hour. I'll go ahead and do mine first just because it relates to this namecheep story which is that with Bitcoin we know that it's mostly being treated as a store of value right now. We get a lot of people outside the Bitcoin community that complain we know when are you going to buy coffee with it? It's not a medium of exchange. It's not really a currency. Well, when Bitcoiners end up having 99% of their wealth in Bitcoin and that's all that they can ever spend if they want to spend just because Bitcoin has outperformed every other asset in their portfolio, you're going to start to see Bitcoiners have to part with Bitcoin because it's just the only money they have left to spend. So, I think that that medium of exchange use case is becoming more and more prominent. We're going to cover the different ways that businesses can accept and do payments, crossber payments, etc. on future episodes. But I guess my closing thought would just be that it feels with Bitcoin's performance outperformance against other assets in a portfolio that it's just destined to become more of a medium of exchange as Bitcoiners still need to buy things in the real world. Yeah, maybe I'll p piggy back on that because I didn't necessarily have final thoughts, but I think that is a a core aspect that I've run into a lot of conversations around like deflation and stagflation and like even there's just all these different um vectors where people will reference if Bitcoin goes to millions of dollars, nobody will want to spend it and it's just rooted in the wrong basis of economic coordination where as the price goes up that's not happening in a vacuum more and more people that that's a product of people wanting it adopting it. And when people want it and adopt it, well then they naturally produce value in the world, they're going to make an intentional effort to either say you can do pay me x or y and incentivize you to pay you and y if y is bitcoin or they can go as far as saying you can only get my goods or services if you pay me in bitcoin. And so now the other side of that market that loves that treasures their bitcoin if they want to eat and get that cow they're going to either pay in bitcoin or or or fig you know not eat right. And so that's the last part is Bitcoin's adoption um is embedded as more and more people want it and more and more people will demand it for its good goods and services and like on multi institution is a great example of this because people can pay in dollars but a lot of people pay in BTC it's like well why would they give up their hard-earned bitcoin it's because the thing of value is helping them increase their bitcoin exposure protect it long term and so they're happy to to pay in that bit Bitcoin and if we just only accepted Bitcoin people would still um you know do that accepting dollars makes it easy and convenient because people like reoccurring and all that and we can easily sweep that into BTC. >> Agreed. And just piggybacking off of that too, employees and and people who want goods and services will inevitably only take that or um make you pay a premium in fiat um just to pay for their conversion cost to BTC and just the other hassle that's associated with it, which is going back to my earlier point about employee continuity and why you should adopt Bitcoin and why you should want your customers, suppliers, and and even competitors to adopt it as well. >> Yeah, well said, Liam. And I think yeah, no real final thoughts from me. I think this was my first pod. So, it was it was nice doing this rip with you guys and we'll work out sort of the the rest of the kinks as we as we continue. But yeah, super excited overall to kind of really guide business leaders through Bitcoin adoption as a core savings technology and excited to excited to be a part. >> Yeah, we didn't get to go deep in the weeds on implementation and a lot of the things, but we'll we'll cover them as they organically organically come up. Um, we got our first flipping. Uh if you notice Liam thought Bitcoin wasn't for competitors and now he did. So over the course of uh weeks we will see who who's flipping who. Uh I would encourage anybody to like subscribe and also comment on um what they want to see the format uh feedback because it really helps influence kind of uh what we're going to try to deliver week after week. >> Yeah. Thanks so much guys for taking the time today. Yeah. Like Michael said, please like, subscribe, share it with a business owner, business leader, executive that you know that you want to protect. And uh please give us that feedback, especially after episode one here in the comments, so we can know which topics you all are most interested in. And we'll see you either next week if you guys demand it or the week after. Thanks everyone. >> Thanks guys. >> Thanks guys.