The Sound Money Supercycle: Gold & Bitcoin vs. the Dollar

What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous extra ever assembled in the history of dapters. 1974, 1987, '92, 97, 2000, whatever we want to call this. It's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. >> I say when we sell. Hey, Muhammad. I say when we sell. >> What's going on with Bitcoin Treasury companies? Is this the super cycle that people have been talking about? Why are bond yields spiking? Gold prices hitting new all-time highs. How do you protect yourself in this environment? So, we sat down with Jesse Cobberick this week. May not be familiar with Jesse, but he is a corporate lawyer. He's a Bitcoiner, and it was fun to have him on the show. He's been a friend of Onramp for a long time. He's had great and balanced takes on the Bitcoin Treasury companies and you know he just has a great understanding of what's going on in the market. So I enjoyed this conversation and ultimately we meandered in a lot of different directions that I think you'll really enjoy. Had a lot of good laughs but also I think a lot of great insights. So stay tuned for this one and ultimately we talked a little bit about how do you actually protect your Bitcoin for the long haul. Of course, here at On-Ramp, we feel like multi-institution custody is really the best way for most people to do so to make sure that not only you but your family can access Bitcoin for generations so that you can borrow against it, so you can securely hold it, so you have insurance built around it, and more. So, if you're not in touch with us already, head to onrampbitcoin.com, schedule a consultation, and I would love to meet you. Really enjoy connecting with listeners of the show. So, hope you enjoy this one. It was a good one. >> We are back. Am I Am I allowed to say that? Michael and Brian were giving me a little bit of grief before we hit record here, but we're back. It's the last trade. >> This week, we got Jesse Cobberick joining. Jesse is a hidden gem in this space. Jesse, I think we've been connected for a while before uh way back when you were anonymous on Twitter and now you've revealed yourself to the world and you've had some really great takes on Bitcoin treasury companies, just market structure. You're a corporate attorney, so you have a lot of great perspectives that I think are usually missing in this space and excited for this conversation. So, Jesse, thanks for joining us. What's going on? >> Yeah, you bet. Thank you for having me. I'm a big fan of On-Ramp and the podcast, so I appreciate it. Yeah, I'm a I'm a corporate lawyer. So, sorry. Go ahead, Michael. >> What's your handle on Twitter? Are you Do you have that out? >> Just my name now. I just changed it to Jesse Cobbernick. >> I forget what it was before. >> Are you allowed to share? Am I allowed to say what I think it was? >> What was it? Yeah. >> No. >> No. Go ahead. >> Wasn't it like something like MK MK Ultra or something? >> Isn't that like Mexican cartel or something? >> No, it wasn't MK Ultra. No. MKL. Okay. So, there's somebody else. Why I'm calling it out is because >> mission, wasn't it? >> Yeah. See, I uh But there is there is another Ultra out there that's listening. Um because there's a lot of anons out there that listen and they comment all the time and they DM us and we appreciate it. We appreciate listeners and Jesse was one of them, but I think it was a different uh handle. I'm getting it mixed up. >> That might be my >> other side of the housekeeping. Uh >> that might be my >> Did I do your alt account? confirm or deny. >> See, that's why I was asking what I didn't know. But the other side of the housekeeping was um we were having a discussion about uh you know, Jackson and how this like we have to maybe stop unless the audience really enjoys us, you know, just discussing his financial and personal matters. >> They do. I I actually know for a fact the audience enjoys that, but go ahead. Yeah, because you know we were looking at the comments recently and um it I really appreciated them because we hear Jackson you know belly ache about the home prices and all these things the boomers and by the way we have boomers listening so they don't really take kindly to you know them them being looked at as the problem. Um but the most recent or either with Groman I believe was uh explaining that Jackson should just you know pull himself up by the bootstraps, get a a a paint roller and get his get some elbow grease and get a little dirty and figure it out. like just quit crying on the podcast. So, if if you feel the same way, let us know in the pod. If you think he needs a raise, actually, then let us know as well and we'll we'll figure this out uh as we go on through the podcast, unless Jackson just quits out of just pure spite. And then we're kind of going to have to figure that part out as well. >> Yeah. I mean, I've been humiliated on this podcast so many times. And I've grown immune to it to be honest. And um >> was it when you called for UBI? >> No. >> Was it called for UBI? >> Let us know in the comments who side you're on. we want to know. Um, but yeah, it's it's good to be back and I maybe I will learn to pick up a paint roller. Uh, if enough people tell me in the comments, I'll do that. But anyways, banter aside, let's get into this conversation today. Jesse, I'm excited to have you on because like I said, I particularly have found your insights to be spoton um, and very balanced as well, particularly on the Bitcoin Treasury topic. And so, I think we've let that topic breathe a little bit. It's been at least a month, maybe two, since we've really gotten deep in the weeds or discussed what's going on there. And when we did have guests on, let's say back in June, May time frame, people were ecstatic about the opportunities in Bitcoin Treasury companies, >> exuberant, >> exuberant. Brian, Michael, myself, um, you know, were were called out in the comments. We we some of even the guests were getting a little angry with us in terms of just our perceived lack of understanding of Bitcoin treasuries because we weren't weren't really bought in on the idea of investing in public companies to aim to outperform Bitcoin. So, I would love to revisit that to start this conversation off. Jesse, what what are your thoughts just on the past couple of months here with the price action as it relates to Bitcoin Treasury companies and um yeah, has this kind of have things ended up not to say this is over, but have things ended up so far where you thought they would be or have outcomes been a little bit different than you you thought like six months ago? >> Uh that's a that's a tricky question. I think with um I think the divergence between Bitcoin and Treasury companies has surprised me and surprised a lot of people over the last I mean I guess it's been at this point it's like 3 to 6 months where over the longer horizon there was an expectation of course that if you have a company that's holding Bitcoin kind of in a leveraged way that they will naturally kind of rise with the Bitcoin price and outperform Bitcoin and same thing will happen kind of in the reverse way. So I think it's been surprising to see a lot of these companies including um Micro Strategy do you know so poorly and I think Micro Strategy to date or year to dates underperform Bitcoin by 5 to 10% or something along those lines which of course if you're going out on the risk curve and trying to kind of outperform Bitcoin that's just the worst thing that can happen. Um, as far as kind of why that's happened, I think that's a much kind of trickier question and a and a harder thing to understand. Uh, there's all sorts of kind of postulations about what's occurring. Is this kind of the death of Bitcoin treasury companies? Are they all just going to inevitably um go to an MNAV of one? I think there's there's some people out there that have been saying that. I I don't think that's the case. I think we're we'll probably continue to see similar oscillations as we've seen with strategy with MetPanet. Um I don't pay as much attention to the newer ones that don't have any track record because I just don't think it's it's it's not a great use of time, I think. But I I think we still see oscillations. I feel like if if Bitcoin runs, you know, goes up another 100% over the next 12 months, it's hard for me to see kind of a continued underperformance by the likes of um Strategy and Metanet. But I do think what what I think is most likely to occur is you see oscillations, but you have a lower high and kind of then lower lows. So they kind of do at least from an MNAV perspective, from a multiple of nav perspective, that's I think the most likely outcome. And then um there are several reasons I think why they performed so poorly. But I'm kind of curious what you guys think. What what do you before I give my theory on, you know, at least the last few months? Yeah, I mean I so there's all these narratives out there, right, about there's institutional capital that's looking to get in from equity and debt markets into the Bitcoin treasury companies. And I think there's some truth to that, but I think largely these are retail driven markets. And so to your point, Jesse, if if I'm correct about that, these are largely retail driven markets, especially of course on the equity side, you could make it and you could say MSTR is a little bit different than the rest of them in terms of their corporate structure and the types of investors that have participated there. But let's like, you know, put that aside for a second, focus on the equity stack of these companies. The people who are investing in my opinion and for what I've seen are largely retail investors and they're looking to outperform spot Bitcoin. And so I just don't know how long people can be bag holders of these companies and underperform Bitcoin. Right. So to your point, like >> yeah, if if sentiment shifts and Bitcoin starts to rally, things pick up steam here and those equity prices start to get some momentum and come back, then I think if that happens in short order, then I do think that um there will be still a lot of euphoria around this trade. But at the same time, I I just wonder how long people will hold on to these companies, especially the ones that, as you mentioned, don't have any track record. Um you know, just kind of been spun up in the past couple months. So, that's kind of my thought is like people are underwater. Most people are underwater pretty significantly and I wonder how long they they hang in for. >> Yeah, there's um there's so much here. I don't even know. I I don't I I I love Jesse, so I don't I I wouldn't say this if it was just a normal guess. Like uh I I disagree. I think these things won't won't only trend to one. They're going to trend to lower than one. Um but before going maybe into that if you guys want me to expand. Uh I think this came out which partially is with MSTR is uh uh basically NASDAQ requiring additional shareholder approval. Um and just as it relates to crypto stocks and what does it look like for them to be raising capital and you know and I'm kind of surprised that this didn't happen before. It's always been a little weird with uh what strategy was doing in the markets and how it was pretty neutral, right? There was no like positive or real hard negative sentiment for three or four years. You know, basically taking leverage out to buy Bitcoin as a publicly traded company and being really loud about it. Not saying that's good or bad, just that the market didn't do anything. Uh I think it just from a very basic level you're effectively uh you know trading in a dollar and hoping to get a$120 like at the the simplest level like that's the the role of a treasury company and at a closed end fund which is what these mimic um they should trade at a discount because you have management fees and other associated um costs and so the idea is that they're going to trade at a as at an increased premium And I think where people I don't want to say got lost but assume that that's the case between a number of reasons why they'll make up is just because of the financialization of just everything else. And so to the point that I think we all agree on is it's speculative. Um and to what Jackson was sharing that speculation has really no fundamentals outside of vibes and who's on the management team. So ultimately when that reflexivity comes up and volatility nobody wants any part of that. people can barely hold on to BTC and that has all the fundamentals of basically being money. So what are they going to do with these assets? Now when you take it a step further, you just naturally look at like the long and short end of time duration. The long end is if anybody goes down the path that Bitcoin becomes money, well that drastically reduces the amount of financial services businesses that exist. Parker Lewis had a great article back in 21 called Bitcoin's the great defanancialization, right? So it just doesn't even isn't coherent that there would be these many companies in a long end. But let's talk about the short end, which is today. And you have 10 different ways that these things delever. The easiest one to point to is we all know anybody that's held Bitcoin for multiple years, the amount of learning curve and time it takes place to come into this asset and hold on to it. How can we expect somebody to come in and ape into a hundred 500 billion dollar positions and have any idea what they're doing whether it's managing it from a custody perspective and all the diligence required and so somebody somewhere will mess up and when that happens all these retail investors that have no idea that custody actually even matters are going to flee from these assets causing them to dislocate from their traditional like price that they're looking at and there's a number of other things but I don't actually there's no this isn't the time to dance on treasury company grace because that's going to be in like 24 months when they blow up like the traditional markets right now. This is just showing what's going to happen. But it's going to come back. Like interest rates are going to go. People go further out on the risk curve and we're going to see this come back with a vengeance. But from a ve very base level perspective, there's no real value. And then I guess maybe the last part is people just naturally have to go further on the risk curve to generate uh validate why they'd be trading above a 1x MNAP or whatever it is. And nobody in Bitcoin's history because you know of them and or only the the right people know of them can generate that kind of alpha. So you're effectively just setting yourself up to be blown up by trying to go and speculate to increase like every and that ties into where a lot of these companies say they're going to go become the Berkshire Hathaways. All it is is so much [ __ ] that's being told out in the market that because you're going to be able there's all the crazy people out there. I can't call them out because it's sad, but like that they're going to accumulate and they're going to become these Warren Buffettesque empires that are going to now allocate across the board and make more Bitcoin. It's like you couldn't do that in the private market in a private entity vehicle whether because there's no different if you just set up your own company or VC fund or PE fund. Why would it make any different now that you're in public form? You're going to just turn into like God. Um so yeah, just some light opinions. Yeah, maybe that what I would add to that is I think we we sort of hit on this idea of you know in the treasury company space there's an idea or there's a notion that these things should change trade at a premium to MNAV because of the financial engineering because of the leverage etc dilution whatever you want to call these mechanisms now I would take it sort of a step further and say even saying that the floor of 1xmnav Michael to your point is kind of a fallacy in the sense that it would be one thing if like these were actual uh funds wherein you could redeem Bitcoin out of them or you even had some claim on the bitcoin but because you don't and there's no claim and there's no redeemability um it doesn't even necessarily have to trade at at 1m like it could they could definitely go below and they probably should because if there's no go forward um accumulation mechanism or even business prospects of like a core operating business. Um whether that's Bitcoin related or not, um there's no reason it should trade at 1x because you're layering in all of these additional risks from um mismanagement to custody. All of these sort of layers of of counterparty risk are added on to that quote unquote Bitcoin exposure, which you actually have no claim on. So I I expect a lot of these to go well below one. Um, and you know, we've talked about this in the past. Maybe the the bigger boys, the MSTRS of the world buy up the smaller ones when they're trading at, you know, a discount for a prolonged period. Um, but I would also agree like it, you know, certainly not the time to dance on grays because this stuff will come back as Bitcoin moves again most likely. Um, and you know, rates are cut, all these things that you mentioned, Michael, like I I do think there's still legs on this this trade, per se. Um but the the underlying dynamics of the the layers of risk associated with this proxy exposure where again there's no claim uh or redeemability um I think that all remains remains the same. The the thesis against these things uh in mass is the same. The only distinction I'd make there is between I think the retail investor and like his performance versus the company itself and like the decision-m a company would make because sometimes I think about it from sort of an individual's perspective where okay let's say you have cash reserves $100,000 or a million dollars and you go out and you buy Bitcoin and you you continue to kind of work. Bitcoin goes up, Bitcoin goes down, you're still sort of better off, I think, in, you know, a few years having moved a substantial portion of your reserves into Bitcoin. And so I I kind of think with some of these Bitcoin treasury companies, um, there's a conflation between like the underperformance by the investor and the kind of destruction of the company itself. Because I could see if you look at a company like Metaplanet that's grown, you know, I don't know how how much bigger in market cap. If it were to kind of go back to being a hotel company, it has one hotel. And so if it were to go back to being a hotel company now, now it has now it's a hotel company with 20,000 Bitcoin. That's like significantly better than like before where it was just a hotel company that was suffering and had no no balance sheet with Bitcoin. So, I do think from we might see sort of a second wave of companies that aren't trying to um solely put Bitcoin in the balance sheet or raise equity or kind of sell common stock or raise debt to buy Bitcoin, but instead are just using it as a reserve the same way individuals are. And so I I I'm a little bit um I'm a little bit hesitant to say that these companies will kind of implode so much as they might just continue to underperform and have to come up with some other business plan um around what they're doing. >> Yeah. My I mean my feedback to that would be like the guy's a hotel company. Why would I want 20 as an investor him to have 20,000 BTC to do anything? Like I think that's because I've had this discussion with very prominent people in this space that asso assume and associate and this is just a product of like over financialization of the market where if you're a good trader or a good um uh like money money manager you conflate okay if I get a balance sheet in a war chest now I'm going to go be able to um allocate it and deliver value to the market and it's kind of insane because everyone knows M&A generally ends up in like a a negative outcome. Um it's very hard to build businesses and when you think about pure like running and operations and so it's just the notion that uh and and so like and and we were talking about this earlier like part of um part of you know great lies is there's always parts of truth that's kind of like you know the story of crypto and there's blockchain and there's like quotequote you know DeFi and whatever that there's just some truth to it. It's just not like the soundness that Bitcoin has. In the same way that there's an insane amount of truth that the right companies like a Figma that have core competencies having a better war chest that's going to allow them to go out compete in the market is there and every business is going to need Bitcoin. Like those things are all fundamental. It's just the notion of somebody sold investors on they're going to accumulate this and then the market naturally recognizes because at a at a base level like being in this industry for so long you start to realize people just are scared shitless of holding spot for a number of reason and custody is like a a sub like a subcon subconscious version of it or how it manifests. you end up in like all these crazy products cuz you're just like pushing out the the risk to somebody else and over time whether it's multi institution or whatever it is people just naturally gravitate the market will form around how do I just get the best most synthetic version like the underlying without any of the dirt and pork uh associated with it and that's effectively what these companies are just this early that people are conflating the exposure and so that's the biggest like if I had to pick one thing why I don't see this persisting long enough is because once the market gets educated there and like we didn't even talk about the insane management fees and structures that uh BitMEX came out with that went and deep dive into some of these companies. So to Brian's point like they theoretically should be much less than 1x because if you look at like the way that they're taking fees I think the pro cap is taking like 20% of the bit or bitcoin exposure on the upside. So, um, >> I do think I do think it's a it's an important distinction that that Jesse you raised though because I totally agree like >> over the long term every every business of any type or form or size should and will own Bitcoin as a reserve asset. Um, that's very different than, you know, a spa merger shell company who doesn't have an operating business but their plan is to accumulate Bitcoin. like that there just there's different flavors of these things and there's sort of a a taxonomy uh that's emerging of like the Figma of the world where they're not focused on their Bitcoin treasury strategy as a as a core of their business um but it's additive uh to what they're doing versus you know a purist Bitcoin treasury company that's just looking to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible. It's very difficult to have differentiation there and and where you end up is either a taking more leverage or b doing something actually innovative which like I will grant sailor and strategy um some some kudos on the actual financial engineering and innovation that they've done in terms of basically offering different um risk return profiles for this the underlying asset Bitcoin to all these different investors. I get it. That makes sense. The their business is actually the stock itself. I think that's very difficult to replicate. Um, MetaPlanet probably has the best shot of doing something like that. Um, but for everybody else, they're kind of in this limbo no man's land unless they have a core operating business. And then there's this other camp which like is sort of promising a core operating business but doesn't have it yet. And that's sort of the the incorrect order of operations there. So I think it's a good call out Jesse just in the sense that there is sort of an emerging taxonomy. different flavors of these things. Um, and I think they have to be looked at in in slightly different ways. >> Yeah, I think that's right. And I and I think, you know, Michael, you brought up the point of investors not being able to weather the volatility. And I I said this kind of early 2024 warning people like if you haven't held Bitcoin through a bare market, you have like almost zero chance of coming out on top holding like being able to hold Micro Strategy because it's going to be more volatile and it's going to have more kind of um associated risks because it's a company and it has fallible people associated with it in the way Bitcoin doesn't quite as much. And I I mean I I I actually think most investors in Bitcoin treasury companies um even the ones that have done well are going to underperform Bitcoin. And the reason I think that is because you know the folks that think they can time things and lose, they're of course going to lose and out to Bitcoin. But the folks that win, I think that they they to a degree will have some confirmation bias about their ability to trade around Bitcoin. And so they won't most of them won't just do what they should have do, which is, hey, I made this trade and I and I ended up on top. I'm going to put my I'm going to now put this back into Bitcoin. Instead, I see a lot of people trying to time sort of the market, try to go either time the market around Bitcoin or go further out on the risk curve, go to smaller Bitcoin treasury companies, take on kind of uh pursue kind of riskier options plays. So, I think by and large it's going to be a small minority of people that outperform just buying and holding Bitcoin. Yeah, maybe that's a good somewhat transition to like uh I don't know if this was on the list, but it's just like very present in the past few weeks, the just resurgence of crypto. I think even Bitcoin dominance got down to like 55% yesterday. And the notion of um I think honestly that's where I've just been the most frustrated and and spoken out is because I've seen it over time, especially like in a business like On-Ramp where we're trying to help protect people's wealth that you want to help. We see people, you know, there's been margin calls for people's MSTR shares. There's just like a no shortage of different ways people can lose their money. It's happened for 15 years and it never looks like it uh at face value. It looks like in hindsight, right? The BlockFi is a Celsius, like all of those things. And to your point, you ult you ultimately have to be a trader to get out on top. And in my view, there's no difference between that and like Salana or crypto or whatever else that you're doing. The whole point of like, you know, finding the the best performing asset is you park your money in there and then you get to go back to whatever you're meant to do and maybe make more Bitcoin. And uh what you're is sharing is like what we're seeing now coming back and there's like not only the if you're already talking you know pretty objectively about the Bitcoin digital asset treasury companies then like definitely know your feelings on you know there's hyperlquid and all these crazy treasure companies but then there's just naturally um the narrative coming back with ETH and everything else and it's coming back with a vengeance and I'm curious like did you see that coming because we had been you know discussing for months of like will retail make the same mistakes and blah blah blah. And I'm just curious like how you see this and if you foresaw it or you're you're also shocked of like I can't believe we're going to re kind of redo altcoin season and everything associated. >> No, that shocked me to be honest. I but I'm surprised anytime like ETH doesn't just trend down to zero. And so the idea of big institutional players um building ETH treasury companies or I think I saw a Doge. Did I see a Doge Treasury company? Maybe it was Salana. Um, it it it seems absurd and um but I don't know, maybe it's a maybe it's a sign of uh that the the cycle's continuing and we're entering more euphoric stages. I'm not sure it but it definitely surprised me. >> Yeah. I mean, on that point too, Michael and Jesse, um, it it's kind of interesting to me because a lot of people cite how, you know, prior to just being Bitcoin only, they were involved in trading altcoins. Then they kind of realized they sucked at trading. They understood why Bitcoin was really a winner take all market. It has the monetary properties and they stuck with Bitcoin. But then when the Treasury companies came about, it was almost like they they had suppressed these urges to to be like trading crazy crazy [ __ ] And so they went back into like the public, you know, this time in public market equities and because it's Bitcoin like everyone on Bitcoin Twitter and all the podcasts are okay with it and there's all these narratives surrounding it. But it's almost like had to like suppress these uh these urges to be trading altcoins for a cycle or two, but now that there's like these other types of vehicles to get back into, that's pretty much what I see. And then yeah, I I mean I don't have much to add. And I think the crypto stuff is like is going to persist for a while. Um it's just a matter of there are not many people like the four of us and the listeners of the show who are Bitcoin only. Uh most people have like very very little understanding about Bitcoin. They haven't looked into it much at all. And so when they're bombarded by cryp uh but by the entire crypto ecosystem, it it does take quite a while to actually start to discern what's going on here. So I think that's that's something we're going to have to deal with for a long time. Yeah, we're unfortunately it's going to be a a very long time. Um I liken it to like basically whatever bubble we've been in, however long anybody here on this pod or listening is you have to extrapolate that that's only like call it just 1% for easy math of the total humanity, individual investor, whatever you want to call it that understands any of this stuff. And so when the market comes back and the market is naturally following you know uh vibes for lack of better word vibes can come in different forms they can come from an influencer they can just come from your government and telling you it's okay to buy 401k right into crypto and you just put it in a basket. The point being is right now the vibes are historically are 6040 and now we're seeing you know crypto assets and you know private equity has been the previve of that like people going further on the risk curve and alts um and so we're just going to have to see people get rugged but I think it's important why you call it out um because you can build a brand and a reputation if you're right around always kind of supporting and making sure you were kind of like the the pragmatic version especially if you've seen this play out. And to Jackson's point, that's really been the second part most frustrating is, and it makes sense like in Bitcoin, it's very hard to make money because what do you do? You sell it or you custody it and even custody it very few people want to pay for whatever. And so historically, the Bitcoin influencers have been doing a lot of work to educate and they never been able to monetize. And so it was very easy to be like, "Here, join, do this." You throw some shares, you throw whatever. But the reality is a you you just can't make money from nothing. and money doesn't grow on trees. And so that's ultimately what this is. Um, but there two is I think there's like when you when your beds are packed, doesn't matter how whatever the investment is, you just like can't help. This is why the great traders have no problem switching on a dime, right? We talk we talked with Luke Goman last week and he talked about he recognized he was wrong and you think about PTJ and all these guys but traditionally any investor whether they invested in a VC fund or whatever their stock you get real like connectivity to that. It's like this notion of throwing good money after bad money and you just continue to go down. Everybody's played poker you get in a pot and you're like committed and you should just be cutting losses. And so point being um I lost what the point was going to be. It was like related to if you're uh Oh, so so you get in that that trend, you're in there and you have these influencers where they got thrown a bone. Um and you get involved and you're already into Bitcoin. Like you're you're there. So you're like, "Oh, it's not a big deal." Uh this is this is a way to create more Bitcoin. There's a lot of stories I go into, but the main point is that this is a sliver of risk capital. Like that's a great way to like again like lies and truths. It's like this is risk capital and like sure there's no problem with anybody that's long Bitcoin to do whatever they want. It's I mean they can do anything with anything. But the reality is most people aren't sophisticated to put risk capital. So they just associate like oh this is my Bitcoin exposure and they forgot how people come into the space have no idea about anything we're talking about here. And so it's really like a negative incentive uh and really is going to burn a lot of people because I mean you're you see this firsthand like these groups and these communities become like their identities are tied to it and it's always just the first version of like like smoke before fire. You've seen this with [ __ ] Waco. You see like across the board if you need a community to do anything like you basically are running something that's not really because it should come organically. Oh, >> yeah. And I think we've seen that with some of these some of these companies have tried to manufacture that sort of um that that social sentiment around their companies. And but they can't get around sort of the fundamentals of how they went about raising capital. And I'm not going to call out specific companies, but there's plenty that that raised capital um kind of on the belief or sort of professing that they needed to raise hundreds of millions or, you know, 700 million or billion dollars in capital in order to then uh be successful and get institutional interest and get preferred stock listed. And that was that's sort of been the the communication that they've made. But the result has been kind of a lot of insiders and early investors getting uh very cheap warrants or participating in pipe offerings. And then at least from an outsider, this is what I was seeing these capital raisings occurring concurrent with this manufactured social sentiment on Twitter. Whatever it may be, this is this is going to be kind of better than micro strategy. And the result of that, like kind of inevitably, is that retail is going to get rugged or going to get crushed. Um, and I think we're seeing that now. And I don't know if that'll I think that's goes to sort of the um question of whether there'll still be positive sentiment around treasury companies, a lot of them, when you've when you created a company and raised capital in that way. >> Yeah. and and what you just outlined is so eerily rem reminiscent of the ICO altcoin playbook, right? Like it it is the same thing like senior edge insiders getting a better deal uh dumping on retail like that is the playbook. And so that's why there is again we have to revert to the taxonomy. There's different flavors of these things, but in in the instances that you just described, which is a large slew of these things, it just reeks of of ICO coin altcoin pump and dumps like that. It it's the same exact playbook. >> Yeah. And it's sad because you don't get a lot of people telling talking about stuff like this because um ultimately if they're not in their bags are involved or they, you know, backed one um their friend did. like there's very few people in the industry that this didn't like touch. It's super close and uh so people have just been hesitant, but it's just the reality. Um and to your point, the ICO stuff. Yeah, it's I don't I think it's going to come back. Um I think it's going to come back. I think the reality though is that the market the the big one of the big lies again in all this is that institutional allocators can get exposure to Bitcoin. Like you see Harvard with a hund00 million plus position, right? And they're in gold too. Like I would say it's almost infinitely harder to get a good position in a gold than a Bitcoin at this point. Um you know from just like how you think about it and the number of players and and in involvement in proxy exposures. And point being is that that will dry up. Even if it was true, I don't believe it was, but even if it was uh I would say MSTR had the only angle from the the convertible bond market, like that's where you can't, you know, you can't play unless you're a big boy. But when it comes to just like getting exposure to BTC when >> over time, even if >> Yeah, pre-ETF. >> Yeah, exactly. Pre-ETF. But when you play it out, that's the other side of it. It has to be a trade and at least recognizing because as allocators recognize not only the risk but like you could just go get better exposure or reduce fees like this was always just a trade and uh and that's why I called out the version of well on the other side of it you're going to become the Warren Buffett or the Medici and you're going to be able to like allocate this capital like you're just a soant. It's just like incoherent because nobody's built a Bitcoin war chest and just like deployed it across and made a bunch of money. Uh, so >> it's yet to come. Yet to come. >> So, if you heard the start of this episode, we have a little bit of a battle going on between Michael and I. We air it out every week on The Last Trade. If you can show up in a big way this week, leave a comment in favor of me, Jackson. I appreciate it. Leave a like, subscribe, rate five stars. All of that really helps grow the show, get the message out there, and we spend a lot of time, right? We're reaching out to guests, and then we're preparing for episodes and recording them. We are editing and distributing them. So, a lot of work goes into it to package this up into an hour to two hours every single week. And hopefully, it's valuable to you. So, if it is, let us know in the comments section. Please leave us a like. Goes a long way. And uh if you want to hear more from us, not just on the podcast, I'd really recommend going to our website and signing up for our research newsletter. Brian does a great job. He's sending out one weekly newsletter, more of a roundup discussing what's going on in macro, Bitcoin, other markets, etc. And then typically one other newsletter will go out as well that's not necessarily topical, but could be more evergreen or deeper dive or product announcement, etc. So, if you're not subscribed already, check that out as well. Is this just a treasury pod, Jackson, or do you have anything else you want to to chat about? Do we rock your world with the the house stuff? Is that Did that Did like that that stun you for? >> Yeah, I'm just Yeah, I'm just stumbling through this one. Lost I lost uh all confidence at the start of this show. I'm just trying to get through it at this point. Um but no, I wasn't sure if Jesse had any other thoughts, but I I was hoping to move on. I wanted to zoom out um zoom out to the the the big Ponzi scheme that's that's actually happening in in front of all of us and that's the US dollar. And for some reason it never occurred to me to like look at the historical chart over 100redyear period for gold. But what we've pulled up here for people who are aren't not on YouTube and just listening have the chart of the gold price from 1915 to present July or July 2025. And when I look at this, if you removed all the context from this page here, just looked at the chart, it looks exactly like the Bitcoin price chart. And so it started to occur to me more. I mean, obviously we're kind of living through this debasement devaluation of the US dollar, but when we had Luke Goman on the podcast last week and he was just talking about how, you know, when he looked at the Bitcoin price after the blowoff top in 2017, the price corrects 80% in 2018 2019 starts to come creeping back up in 2020 and into 21. He took a second look at it and determined that it was really, you know, Bitcoin was showing the collapse of a currency. the collapse of the dollar in in real time. And so I would love to talk about gold because a well Michael loves it. I'm trying to get back on Michael's good side. So we'll talk about gold for a little bit. But it's it's kind of eerily similar to look at the Bitcoin price chart since inception. So call it whatever that is at this point, 16 years versus 110 years of gold. And you can see once that peg was broken and gold was no longer fixed at whatever it was, was it like $35 or $40 an ounce? I forget. in 1971. The charter looks exactly the same as the Bitcoin price chart. So, I'd love to just talk about um you know, reactions to this. Maybe I'm just an idiot for not uh you know, looking at these charts side by side before, but what do you guys think? >> Now, I love that you brought it up because um a I love gold because it's my canary in the coal mine that the world's healing at at the end of the day. like gold's breakout means, you know, obviously, not obviously, but we've seen Bitcoin follow, but it's a reality going back to money doesn't grow in trees. And when you have that happen, then all accountability ends up coming back on a long enough time horizon. What Jackson just shared is something that I've also kind of slowly uh realized and I feel very dumb. We it was part of like multiple conversations but really Groman highlighting some of the charts on his Twitter are wonderful when it looks against you know housing gold BTC and the dollar and be the dollar being like down like 80% Bitcoin being up I want to say like crazy numbers I don't even know you it's hard to see on the chart and then gold up like 80 80%. Um, but it's the reality of for like I think all you know how we talk about what like we kind of feel it's so obvious that we're holding Bitcoin and it's like how can nobody else see this and we're just kind of like winning in life and blah blah blah and you have more money and and you can make more optionality. It's just truth like that's what money's for. And we're like how can't people see it? I'm starting to realize that this is actually how all the smart people have been navigating the past hundred years. Like when you look at sovereigns and you look at people, I remember in a previous life like 10 plus years ago I was in college. I ended up working at this like bullion dealer and there would be this guy and there would be other people but this guy would come in almost every two weeks he'd buy $999 so $9,999 worth of gold bullion or or silver junk silver and I just didn't understand it and I've always thought he was crazy but it hit me. It's like he was stacking Bitcoin, right? Because he understood against everything else it was depreciating. And when you look at these charts over the past, Groman had the 50-year chart against gold. Gold has been the best performing asset. And you start to look back at like what is, you know, time's a flat circle. What's old is new. And this was like written in biblical terms where you have your, you know, a third of your money in your house or your land and a third of your money in your money, you know, gold and a third of money in your work. And look at Tether. Tether is one of the most sophisticated players on the planet Earth. exactly their playbook. They have hard assets, 50 tons of uh gold, you know, 100,000 BTC. They have their business that's printing money and then they're buying a [ __ ] ton of land, data centers. And so, yeah, we're just seeing this like revert back and the most sophisticated people recognize it and then the rest of the world lost its way and they're looking at this as lites when this is the most sophisticated play ever is you get the thing that's the hardest which has been gold and now it's Bitcoin and you get yourself some land and and then you get back to winning. Um, so yeah, it makes complete sense. It's kind of crazy that it's the inertia in the Trafi world is not to ever say any of these things. That's why nobody talks about it. >> Yeah. And part of the story there is what's happening with gold and Bitcoin is very reflective of what's happening with bond markets. Um, and Jackson, I think I put a few maybe a few charts related to this, but um, long-term government bond yields are are spiking. Um, and that is that is occurring at the same time that central banks around the world have already begun to cut rates at the short end of the curve and the US Fed is now signaling we're going to start cutting in September. Basically what's happening here is the bond market is calling the bluff and saying you know these these dollars are going to be continue to be debased and so we are demanding higher yields higher high higher coupons for this longdated debt because we know those dollars are going to be worth much less into the future given the unsustainability of the debt deficit spending etc. Um, and so this is, you know, this is really, you know, in my mind, early innings of what looks to be, you know, a debt spiral for the dollar. And, and gold, to your point, Michael, is the canary that's telling you that it, you know, even if you didn't look at these bond yield spiking and you didn't sort of parse through what the the fixed income markets were telling you, gold is telling you the story, the same exact story. Um it's sort of this recognition of the unsustainability of the dollar system specifically um more broadly alli all fiat currencies and then this you know emergent sort of sound money renaissance via gold and bitcoin that people are recognizing in this increasingly multipolar world where you know the the faith and trust in central banks uh continues to wayne. You need to own hard assets. you need to own outside money that can't be um debased or influenced by, you know, a few guys in a room that are setting monetary policy. And so I think, you know, it's it's all of this taken together. You know, it's gold, it's the bond market, it's it's sort of the the broader unwinding of of the fiat system and and the increasing recognition of hard assets, sound money, etc. Yeah, I I think a lot of those I think both the kind of rise in gold along with the um reaction to tariffs in which equity markets and bond markets kind of both perform poorly introduced a new kind of sector or a new segment of the market to the idea of um what is money and like what what is the USD worth? At least personally, I saw among um kind of the more boomer Gen X generation that I talked to that they were thinking a lot harder on that issue because kind of a lot of the fundamental investment beliefs, you know, a 60/40 portfolio will always, you know, perform were undercut. And so I think both that price movement along with seeing gold rise and take kind of a larger share of the international reserves has been uh eye openening to a lot of people and gotten people to think a lot harder about um about how to preserve value. >> Yeah, that that chart from >> Yeah, you flagged this one uh ahead of recording. I I think so again for people who are not looking at the video here it's pretty much just uh global international reserves and it shows the percentage split between gold USD pound sterling and you know some of the other largest currencies and you can see back in the early 1900s that gold was about 90% so roughly 90% in 1901 of global international reserves and it looks like it bottoms out around 10% or so call it in the mid 2000s2010 ends and now I think we're sitting at closer to what gold is about 24% or so of global international reserves and so you know my left bell curve take here is that pretty much reinforces everything that we're talking about right like bonds are selling off globally there's really not demand for longdated treasuries because who wants to get paid back 30 years later in a currency that can be printed into oblivion who wants to get their assets confiscated and so it's remarkable right because 100 years ago and 100 years in the grand scheme of things is pretty short amount of time, but 100 years ago, gold was 90% of the reserves globally and then it bottoms out at 10%. Massive haircut across the board and now we're really just at the very early innings of sovereigns starting to reaccumulate hard money. >> Yeah. And maybe like with that whole hour or however long we talked about treasury companies, the distillate the distillation is the big problem is the difference between saving and investing, right? Because if you look at the gold price, if you just held gold, you didn't have to become an investor and play the volatility of the markets and deal with a lot of the what happened over 50 years. And once you become a, you know, you naturally save, well, then you can decide what you want to invest. And the same thing with BTC, most investors aren't prepared to even start investing because they're not even saving in a better form of money. So they're they've been uh conditioned to go out and invest and go further on the risk curve. It's a product of like where we sit today and how crazy the world is. And so I think that's the core sentiment of like the notion of, you know, saving and investing are fundamentally different things. Um, you've invested your time and efforts to make the money and it should just be able to be preserved. You shouldn't have to invest it. And that's where everything's kind of falling apart. And then that's why you get the craziness in the traditional markets where there's every different product out there trying to take your capital and take their management fees and it becomes harder to hit a benchmark that you're trying to Yeah, there was another chart, Jackson, if you want to pull up the um just China's gold holdings that are just absolutely spiking. So, like this isn't anecdotal, like this is there's empirical evidence to state that like central banks around the world are stockpiling gold, China in particular. Um, and there's sort of long been rumors of, you know, would the BRICS nations do some sort of commodity linked or even goldbacked um, currency? And and, you know, I wouldn't be surprised to see that at some point. But the the broader takeaway is like this is this is the shift. This is the the you know the monetary order shifting in real time and the move towards outside money becoming more prevalent and and even normalized. And you know as we talked with uh Luke about last week like the real starting gun for a lot of this was you know the US freezing um and seizing Russia's treasuries that imparted on the rest of the world like that's not risk-f free. Um there are stipulations that come with storing value in US government debt and unsurprisingly most countries on around the world are not really cool with that. Um and so now they need a different uh savings mechanism and in many instances at least currently that that is gold. I think increasingly it will be Bitcoin. Um but yeah that is that is the shift playing out in real time. This is like a side tangent, but like what that made me realize is there's no such thing as risk-free rate. Like it's just it doesn't make any sense because there's no such thing as risk-free rate for us as individuals. Like the second you get out of bed, there's like risk and you just like calculate it. You decide to take a chance. Like what was it random of shocking number of like people on a motorcycle that are at risk? Like it's just crazy. And point being is so if there's no risk free rate for a personal, why would there be a risk-free rate for any kind of financial investment? And so you could say gold or Bitcoin would be the risk-free rate, but there's still risk associated because if you have 100% of your wealth in BTC or gold, well, what do you do with it? Do you do you bury it all under your house? Well, that's fine, but then you're still at risk if somebody forgets and you get hit by bus or somebody comes and try to steal it and you leave it all with a third party custodian. Or in multi-institution custody, it's like, well, we think there's a lot of risk-free rate there, but it's not it's not completely risk- free. there's still a probability of all these bad things potentially happening. So, the point being is that there's a lull in the sleep of like that notion that it's just there's no risk in life. You're just you take tradeoffs. Um, and I think that's a that's just something we're going to have to reckon with in the future when it comes to like Bitcoin and and storing wealth and what does it look like. But that notion of bonds and risk-free rate and then that's the benchmark and then you start to think about multiples and interest rate and how you like quantify your investments. um they're just all built on this foundation that is is inherently flawed. Not only risk-free rate, but also just like manipulating the cost of capital. >> Yeah, it's it it's pretty wild. I mean, none of these assumptions are really ever questioned, which is the remarkable thing. Um you know, I was in I was instilled from a very young age that uh treasuries were the risk-free rate. That's my par that's what they would read to me in my bedtime stories as a young child. But but in all seriousness, right, like you go to um like college, right? I studied finance and undergrad and and every everything in all those courses, although I will say I I had pretty poor attendance, but every single thing in those courses built upon the assumption of US Treasuries being the risk-free rate, right? So then what if you question the assumption of that and not because you're a crazy person but because you look at the the mounting evidence of the amount of risk that there is in lending money to the government the United States government over particularly over a long period of time. I mean, you can make the case that uh US bill is fairly low risk if you're if you're lending for 30 days, right? And you're trying to generate some short-term interest, but if you start going out on a longer duration and start lending money to an entity that is insolvent, that will just create more money and dilute you, uh, yeah, there's a lot of risk in that. And so I I think it's an exciting time because I don't really think outside of the the places online and you know in person that we find ourselves in there are not that many people that are really talking about this in a serious manner. And I think that's starting to change in particular with gold, right? I mean like Bitcoin is still dismissed. It's still poo pooed as like this like this garbage asset non nonsense what whatever you want to call it Ponzi scheme. That is that is changing but it's not going to change this year. It's not going to change next year. But what might start to change is if gold continues to force allocators. It starts to force retail investors to start to question these assumptions. That I think is probably the forcing function over a longer time horizon where we get back to harder assets. but could also just be wishful thinking. But I think that's the direction we're going in. >> I think that's I think that's probably true. It feels like the market needs to or investors might need to understand like why gold has value like in the same way that um we all went through the education process of like what like what makes good money. I think a lot of people just don't even understand like what are the qualities of money and why has gold um kind of retained its value for that long. And then of course the next logical step is to see hey Bitcoin also has a lot of these attributes but even um more so in a lot of ways except for maybe uh historical duration. So I think that'll that'll also kind of lead people inevitably to to Bitcoin. And I was kind of surprised too to see hear Luke uh Groman talk last week about I think he said something like it'll become normal to have 10 to 20% in like gold and Bitcoin. Maybe he's just being conservative, but I feel like it would be it's going to be um over the next couple decades like significantly more percent higher percentage than that um just based on kind of math in my mind. >> Yeah. I mean I mean 100% like the on a long enough time horizon you end up um outliving your retirement if you choose to allocate to a 6040 portfolio right like it was a couple weeks ago at this point but um there was some sort of letter or >> I don't know if I would call it a recommendation but something came out of Vanguard and they were pretty much citing equity valuations are so stretched we think on a forward-looking basis they produce a nominal rate of return of 3 or 4% or or whatever it was. And so because of that, they recommended, again, I don't know if it's a recommendation, but they cited a 70% allocation to fixed income. And so you could imagine if you are living through a sovereign debt crisis and you choose to put 70% of your savings into lend it to an insolvent entity, it probably doesn't end well for you. And so it's actually, you know, this assumption, the challenging of assumptions of the risk-free rate is really the early innings to totally rewiring how people choose to protect their wealth. And that goes from the individual and it goes all the way to the sovereign wealth fund or the central bank and everything in between. >> Yeah. And this kind of like it's a trope thrown out around how early we are. But this is where you viscerally feel it, especially when you work dayto-day and have these conversations of what we're talking about here is so embedded um in the inertia and psyche of of individuals that it'll take a very long time to move from the 6040 into what you're describing, Jesse, 10 to 20% and greater. But it's also the exhilarating exciting part if you've been following and building or thinking about joining the industry and figuring it out because once you see it clearly then you see all the opportunities that exist. You see it in a venture as an easy example where eventually if the thought is that individuals start to understand just sound money whether it's gold or bitcoin their rate of return and benchmark will naturally change from dollars and that's traditionally where people are benchmarked from a hurdle rate. And so you start to look at venture investments and you have the liquidity and all that, but then you also have them promising you dollars and you push that out to a general 10-year time frame and what is the dollar worth? You know, whatever their 3x hurdle or promising um some of the best performing funds, it's like you're you're sitting on unrealized losses. Like you're in real terms, you're underwater even if you got a top tier VC return. And so then you start thinking about well what do venture firms start to do? It's like well naturally you would see them putting anywhere between you know 5 to 20% just as a a liquid reserve to like help juice that return to get to a benchmark. But that slowly starts to creep into like other parts to the point of like well why are you even raising a dollars and and investors as part of like where the fir the the early writers in the fund stood up is for two parts. One is it's the logical conclusion where everyone comes to this conclusion like Bitcoin or and gold um you're going to store the majority of your wealth in it. And so the realization is well then if I'm going to put my capital at risk because money is money. It's not meant it's me meant to be spent. It's just like where does it spent then I'm going to return I want more Bitcoin. But then the other side of it is when you start to build a business with the Bitcoin treasury and with that is your own personal hoarding rate from how do you build and and think about you know pragmatic efficient business building. you start to realize, oh crap, that's actually going to be the future of how do you build businesses is you have a better treasury uh to, you know, out compete others via inflation and all the things associated which is better with holding a better form of money and you're more discerning with that capital spend because you have Bitcoin's growth. Well, you're naturally going to just have better forces at your back when it comes to competing with others. And so there's huge opportunities in this landscape. But because the alternative is you're like raising tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars and you're, you know, looking your your your benchmark is a false uh benchmark when it comes to dollars and how you think about growth and building businesses. And you see this all the time. We're seeing it right now with interest rates. There's no shortage of companies that were prone to uh lower interest rates that have just completely gone out of business. And that'll continue to happen as you just whipsaw numbers back and forth. you go lower and you come back higher. And so, um, I think it's just not really appreciated how like the noise of the cost of capital being distorted just completely ruins the fundamentals of all these businesses that people are investing in. And so, that's like the first level of tradi having noise and then you just take that and then it just got grafted onto the to crypto. And crypto is like the personification of like fiat but like at an accelerated time scale from like business cycles, right? the deleveragings that happen, but also like the craziness of things built. And that's just the status of where we're at. And that's why things look and feel so weird and nobody really talks about it. So people just are like, uh, I don't know, they're just a little, you know, it's they're a little crazy or whatever. But it's like, no, these things make zero sense. But no, very few people like will say it. Um, but we're like coming up. That's where I I say the gold is the the world healing. Like people are waking up to this stuff. It's just uh it's going to take time. Yeah. So, I wanted to go into Michael, it might have been something that you shared over Slack earlier this week and it ties into the theme of really nothing is risk-free. I guess you could argue like even sleeping in your bed there could be some risk associated with that because Michael said like once you get out of bed there's risk like it could even happen before that. But that point aside, like if you're if you're holding Bitcoin for the long term or you're holding gold or like you have exposure to equities, there's risk in everything, right? Not just from the investment perspective, but also from the counterparty risk that you take on by or counterparty or lack of counterparty risk that you take on. Um because in a in a traditional sense with self-custody for gold or bitcoin as bearer assets you remove counterparty risk but you essentially become the sole responsibility of managing that asset indefinitely and that bears risk as well. And so one thing Michael that you had shared over Slack that had caught my attention was this social engineering scam of pretty epic proportions and devastating. I mean, 783 Bitcoin. So, again, for people who are just listening looking at an article that was published um about a week ago where a Bitcoiner loses 783 Bitcoin in a social engineering scam. And so my the context I would add to this is a lot of people particularly on Bitcoin Twitter and these circles we find ourselves in, they make it sound very easy, right? It's like you buy Bitcoin and you just hold it for the long term and you become very rich and there's a lot of gaps in in that in that path or that um you know the logical progression because it's pretty easy to buy Bitcoin, but anyone who's actually held it for a cycle, two cycles or three cycles recognizes that it's it's hard to do. It's hard to hold it for the long term, especially if you're talking about a material amount of wealth. like forget it if you have uh 0.1% of your net worth in Bitcoin, who cares? Like you don't really need to worry about that. But if you're serious about it and you have 10%, 25, 50, 100% of your wealth in this asset, then it really becomes a scary thing. And so I wanted to open the floor just to some some thoughts around how does this how do we actually navigate the next decade of of Bitcoin ownership, right? because there's going to be those increasing types of uh you know social threats. You know social engineering is kind of an interesting one. It's like a mix of um you know it's mostly digital but has some physical elements as well. This person was actually managing a hardware wallet and the the scammers impersonated both the exchange that they were a customer of and also the support of the hardware wallet manufacturer. So it's like very sophisticated kind of coming from two angles. And so I'm I'm curious like your guys thoughts on just navigating the next decade of ownership. Um we also wanted to talk a little bit about Guardian, something we're doing here at On-Ramp. So maybe Michael hand it over to you first and then Jesse Brian if you guys want to jump in as well. Yeah, I think one of the things to call out uh I was in Dallas yesterday meeting with a bunch of folks and I was meeting with a a family office and they've been in the space for a while and um you know we were gassing each other up around multi-institution and all that but what was sad was they were explaining very significant holders they know have all sold their Bitcoin and made it public and went into the ETFs and this guy had no reason to lie and I was like that's insane. I would rather them like deal with the self- custody and just deal with it because you you think about there's like multiple levels of risk there which is or not risk but loss. Um you have the the taxable events and then you have naturally you're giving up completely that to multiple levels of counterparty risk. Um, so it's real. You know, I I have some other thoughts, but I just want to share like there's just real version because and the reason why they did that was because of just natural security risk as you were saying, Jackson, and and the guy was very it was an older gentleman and uh maybe he's going to start listening to the pod. Uh but he was uh he was referencing, you know, already thinking uh you know, about you know, all the data is out there and all this. sounds like no it's it's like 10x the level of sophistication when you think about is explaining on the dark web some of the most if not most expensive credentials are Coinbase credentials and it's always been the theme that like people probably inside Coinbase sell that data it's not just hacks that happen because like if you have a 5,000 person company and you get access to the data why wouldn't you just download a CSV and and ship that and so you take that data along with you know the chain analysis tools and now AI models and every other CRM and a and you know data has been leaked, you can pretty much discern almost anybody's allocation or balance. Um and the problem is that the bad actors in today's world that are physical that have you know guns and show to people's houses are really looking for gold or like gold and you know phones and and and watches and Rolexes and then the sophisticated people that Jackson just referenced are online. But that's going to converge at a certain point because it's just an ROI, right? As the number goes up in Bitcoin, there's more awareness with it. there's more awareness that a large percentage, you know, over half sits in self-custody. It's just something that the market is not fully appreciated or talked about. And it's also really crazy because this is fundamentally kind of where gold failed is people realized this with gold and that's where Goldmith started and then that's how bank started and that's ultimately where kind of like fiat got inserted is because of the centralization problem. And uh so we've already seen this how this plays out. It's always been kind of a crazy thing to me that some of the smartest people in the Bitcoin space just they've never like logically played it out. It's similar to the allocation stuff that we talk about Dalio and Groman and people always say a smaller percentage than they feel comfortable. It's almost like they know that it doesn't scale but they don't have a solution and they write to say it shouldn't go to Coinbase or Mount Gaus, right? Because that ends up in zero but they don't give a logical solution on how does it play out because if it's everyone holding their money that doesn't work. We we know that doesn't work. I think over time we'll probably see folks have like a diversity of custody with like the bulk of their holdings being in um multi-IG vaults um like the multi-institutional vaults. I I kind of think though right now we're in kind of a trusting phase and a lot of people trust Fidelity and trust Black Rock and trust these treasury companies and to some degree I think that we need things need to kind of get worse or we need to have these sort of cleansing blowups in order for people to be reminded of the importance of self-custody and the risks of centralization. I thought it was really interesting um what Luke brought up on you know reminding us on gold's trajectory and the issues of centralization um and derivatives of course. So I think that there might be kind of a pendulum swing that occurs as as kind of that it naturally does because I think eventually we're going to have a custodian or a a company or an ETF um run into issues just from human risk. Yeah, I I would agree with that. I think there's probably some amount of forcing function that will occur based on an existing single custodian having issues. I think in some ways that's almost preferable against what the alternative would be in my mind is that like the digital and physical threats accelerate rapidly and that would be a separate forcing function which would be worse because that's just like you know people's lives and health in danger as opposed to you know a custodian blowing up which would be terrible for people financially but maybe a little less uh scary on a personal level. Uh but I think that's right. I I I do think we're in a period where Coinbase has sort of been blessed by the US government to some extent. Um, you know, being the issuer of nine out of the 11 ETFs, we're in a phase where people are sort of just ignoring that centralization risk and to your point, trusting that it's going to be okay. And that can only happen for so long. Like Michael, you say this all the time, like that that's the one way that you screw this asset up like is just picking the wrong custodian. you throw a dart at the wall and and you hit one that that has failed. And yes, Coinbase hasn't failed yet. But the other crazy part about the the sort of people ignoring the centralization risk there is like if you have material exposure to Bitcoin, it's a large percentage of your net worth. It's kind of crazy to say I'm going I'm going to trust a company unilaterally that like doesn't even focus on Bitcoin like that. like Coinbase is the degenerate casino. Like that is where their focus has has been over the past decade. It hasn't been on Bitcoin. Now, more recently, they've sort of slightly pivoted because they realize how insane that is. And I think they bought a little bit more Bitcoin for their balance sheet. Um, but all that to say, like you you want a domain expert. You want someone who has the same philosophical values as you to if you're going to trust a custodian or set of custodians, you want the values to be aligned. um for the long term because that it also speaks to the longevity of the business. Like if if Coinbase continues to be levered to the altcoin space um pushing people out the risk curve, getting them to trade all these other tokens, like I I question the long-term sustainability of that business model. Um they should be more focused on Bitcoin. Um and they're not today. And so like you're you're making an active decision to Yeah. You buy the Black Rockck ETF, you think you're trusting Black Rockck, you're really trusting Coinbase, and you're making an active decision to trust a what I would consider not really a a a Bitcoin company in the purest sense uh to custody your Bitcoin. I als I also think that lending solutions around um Bitcoin improving is going to make um people less inclined to use the Coinbases, less inclined to kind of move their Bitcoin to an ETF so that they can get margin loans. I think that as those kind of the the difference in rates that you can earn or obtain through those sources converge, you'll see more people preferring to use hard Bitcoin and keep their Bitcoin versus kind of exchanging it for for uh paper Bitcoin or something that's more easily um marginable. I know there's a lot of companies that are doing interesting things on that front and I think it's kind of inevitable that we'll see that. >> Yeah. >> If I could just jump in real quick. I mean um you to to kind of work backwards. So the example that Michael gave as well about someone who already had a very sizable position of Bitcoin and then chose so they already understood the inherent risk of working with a single custodian and I presume based on the context of that conversation you shared Michael that they were doing self-custody they had a sizable allocation and then they were uncomfortable with the risks of managing it themselves whether I I wasn't in the room for the conversation But I know a lot of the common concerns are just user error of people managing this on a long enough time horizon. Uh their spouses or children being able to access it from an inheritance perspective. It's typically a nightmare for most people. They don't actually have any sort of plan. Um and then you kind of work into other things that people are concerned about, especially if you're a larger holder. And Michael, to your point, a lot of data already is already out there and it's not it's not hard to find. So then you're concerned about people actually showing up to your home and harming you or your family. And so when you start to think about this, it's kind of like um you know, you don't have a cost necessarily of self-custody. You pay dimminimous cost to purchase a hardware wallet and then you don't really have any carry cost on the asset, but all that cost exists on your mental burden and it it it kind of creeps away. It eats away at your peace of mind. And ultimately, that was enough for Michael in that conversation for these people to just be like, you know what, I'm I don't really care about all the self- sovereignty of Bitcoin anymore. I'd rather still own the asset, but I don't want to own it in a way that I can just mess this up, lose all of my money, or, you know, someone show up to my house and and harm my family. So, I think this is ultimately the next 5 to 10 years. what people who've already made the leap of having a sizable allocation of Bitcoin maybe making it their family's you know reserve asset right and now they have to actually grapple with that reality it was it was a different it was a different story 5 years ago when the price was $10,000 but the price is $100,000 and you know people expect it to go higher this year maybe into next as well and at some point it corrects but it's probably not correcting back to 10k or um I'm going to have some some big problems on my hand This is really what people have to start, you know, figuring out over the next 5 to 10 years is like you don't just like you don't just deal with this one time and forget about it and now you actually have to like proactively manage this allocation. >> Yeah. I think like this is a a difficult one to chat about because personally this is why I get so excited is that we're this early. We don't we didn't I don't think we figured out custody and so that's a big opportunity. I caveat what I'm about to say because the the problem where they're I believe mutually exclusive is we get trapped with we talk about the the treasury company or somebody selling a hardware device like everyone is always talking their own buck right like everyone that's just the nature of humanity and you have what you have and you you want it to be uh looked at in a positive light sometimes it's true and you just put yourself on that right side and other times you didn't and so we feel like multi-institution The opportunity set is what democratizes access for people of all shapes and sizes to get real material exposure and preserve their wealth. Now, that's up to the market to decide. Um, but if it is the the the uh vehicle for that, well, what we know and what we talk about on all these podcasts is actually the easy part that this is an investment I want. There's only 21 million. It's the best performing asset. That's not the hard part. The hard part is how the hell do you buy it and hold real sizable amounts of it? And that's why you see the majority of people that have material balances sit in self-custody because that's been the best solution uh and the only solution to credibly know that you have to sever that internet connection and put yourself in control. But that's ultimately becoming uh untenable as the price rises. And so that's just like the where we're at today and it's embedded in the substrate of like why people think this whole industry is speculative because they're concerned with like counterparties cuz every couple years you get this deleveraging because people mess with the underlying and custodians you know lose the assets and everything that happens and that's where nobody's uh feels confident even today and saying over two to 3% because nobody wants to be on the hook for somebody allocating and they get the wrong custodian and so it's just like a chicken or egg problem because custody is not figured out. Nobody can materially allocate and because nobody can materially allocate. You don't have this price and so like that's where we get excited for the first time. You don't have a single point of failure. Um because again in the same way there's no risk-free rate. There is actually no trustless version. You're just trust minimizing because you're trusting yourself if you hold all the Bitcoin and you're trusting that you don't lose your mind or you don't get hit by a bus or you and your wife don't go down in a plane and you're trusting Coinbase. You're trusting ETFs. You're always trusting somebody. Um, and so that's really what's most exciting and I like have to figure out better how to talk about it because it sounds like we're just like talking our book, which we are, but it doesn't matter even if like everything closed today. It's like I don't see how on the long time horizon if Bitcoin wins to be money in a global settlement layer, how multi-institution isn't the way because the main theme is where gold failed, Bitcoin picks up. And it's not the 21 million hard cap because you can do 19 or 22. And it's not even I'm not calling for inflation, but it's not even that like gold is money for thousands of years and it had some form of inflation on an annual basis. It's the fact that the underlying asset is programmatic. And so you can uh basically uh put governance at the asset layer whether it's three custodians or five to move and have eyes on that. That's where gold failed. And for the first time in human history, you can put governance at that asset layer. that had never been done before. And the fact that it's this it's this early, it's that right. Like that's indisputable, that means there's an insane opportunity not only for what we're building, the things we're investing in, but also for people to pick that up and then say, "Oh [ __ ] maybe I can get off one to 10% and 10 to 50 and 50 to 100, especially with the insurance that we're wrapping and all these other things." So that's personally where like I I think that it's the it's the closest we've seen to how do you actually commercialize this space and get people out of all the craziness and the pubos and the DATs and the ETFs and like they can get the same exposure pensions endowments large clients that have hundreds of millions of dollars with us for you know 100k they have it's uh open to them as well. >> Yeah you hit on one thing in there worth reiterating. I think there's always trust assumptions with any custody model. I think what most people discount on the self-custody side is certain people are just okay with trusting themselves basically and putting that burden on themselves. And and for those people that are okay and comfortable with that, that that's totally fine. I think the reality that most people on that side of the campus have not grappled with is that the average person actually doesn't want that responsibility. If it's going to be a material allocation, if it's going to be a material percentage of their net worth, they actually don't want that responsibility and burden. And I think that that I think you could very easily make the argument that that dogmatic thinking has stunted Bitcoin adoption like just generally speaking over the past 15 years. I think there would be more adoption if multi-institution existed earlier than it did or if there were just other options um that weren't so forceful and saying you need to take on this responsibility and this burden because the reality is is someone on zero is it that's a big ask. It's a big ask in terms of the learning curve and then it's a big ask in terms of the responsibility and the burden. Um, and so if we want more people to be able to benefit from, you know, Bitcoin's properties as better money, uh, there needs to be better solutions that aren't just saying let's all let's let all the coins go to Coinbase. Like that's a suboptimal outcome as well. Um and so yeah, we think that obviously multi-institutions fits that sort of elegant hybrid middle ground where yes, you're still technically trusting counterparties, but you're doing it in a distributed fashion where you're not unilaterally trusting any counterparty, which is actually super elegant um and I think still sort of underappreciated that like that is the core of the model. like you as the end client retain some amount of control because none of the entities in the quorum have unilateral control like that is that is that does kind of break some brains because again like this is only possible with Bitcoin like you can't do this with gold to Michael's point that's part of why it failed if you could multi-IG gold maybe it it wouldn't have become so centralized and have you know the 100 to1 ratio of of claims to underlying um and so that you know we do think that this is the way things evolve and and the reality is we just need better solutions because if you want everyone on on Earth to to benefit from the technology that is Bitcoin, you can't force everybody to hold it themselves. >> Yeah. And I think the other thing that's worth calling out is uh I said this for a while, but like the if you're ever out there investing and looking at the space or wanting to jump in, like this is the perfect time like risk adjusted to build the biggest businesses because the people historically in this industry don't really know much. like because you can talk about monetary theory or got bitcoin in 2012 doesn't give you the like is it make you validate to understand a how this is going to play out or b you understood it and you kind of seen this play out like there was always screws a little loose in getting bitcoin even you know depending on how early you were but the notion of um individuals just assume when they came in they learned about bitcoin and then there's never been a second or third order thinking of play out not your keys not your coins forever um and it's not to say one or the other is right for anything it's I don't know how we even got to this place of explaining to people how they should hold their money because nobody would ever tell somebody hold all 100 uh if you were 100% in gold, put it all in your house. Like nobody would be like get the hell out of my house or like put all your money in a duffel bag and and bury it. Like that doesn't make any sense. But we feel confident that we can tell people what to do um with their Bitcoin. And then the other side of it is it's just really a bearish take on humanity if you can't trust anybody. uh it was said with uh Brad Chambers early on one of the I think on the pods but he referenced it also behind the closed doors. It was such a simple distillation of everything we're talking about. It's like do we plan to live in a world where we have to test our food every time we take our family out to eat? Like like it doesn't make any sense. Um and now it's not to say you don't just go all in and trust anybody with anything in your wealth and you have to do diligence. There's all these things but it's just never been fully like explained. And so individuals have taken tropes and they never really got to the root of it. And it's going to actually hurt a lot of people. Like to Jackson's point, that person lost whatever a thousand BTC and people are like shamed into like, well, I got to do it this way. And they feel like there there's no shortage. And this is part of founding this business because I on boarded thousands of clients, billions of dollars into collaborative custody. And I started to realize like at a certain level, people don't know how to reconstitute the wallet. They don't even know what they they put all the seeds and the hardware devices underneath their like desk and they don't realize you could take two pictures of each one and never move any of that and move all the assets. Let alone if the house burns down, wives throw away stuff. Like there's just no shortage that nobody's been incentivized to tell this story or explain it because nobody's had a solution for it. It doesn't make it wrong and it doesn't even make it right. Everyone has to do their own research, but um it doesn't make it wrong because like we also have a solution for it. And that's the beauty of being right and having a product is if you're if if you are right, you're going to, you know, be able to reap the rewards from it. I'm sort of surprised that every company and kind of every board that has a fiduciary duty to their shareholders doesn't use multi-institutional custody because it seems like from a like if you're a director um looking at the liability you're facing that you have to um at least hold a portion of your Bitcoin in that form versus kind of handing it all over to Fidelity or whoever it may be. Um maybe and you know maybe it'll take litigation or something like that to force the issue but it just seems very um if I were a director sitting in a in a company looking to or a trust a trustee trustee of a trust or something like that I would be thinking um I need multi-institutional custody because it's it's kind of the sec most secure way that doesn't involve or doesn't require our company or our trust to rely on a couple individ iduals alone. >> Yeah, I was actually just having this conversation. I don't think this is um killing any confidence, but uh Hester, Commissioner Hester Purse um is out there really pounding pavement, doing like good work, meeting with people in the space and she put something out and we we got in touch and in Dallas and was explaining that exactly. It was kind of like the founding of this business was realizing on a long enough time horizon from an ETF perspective, it's the only way if these assets continue to grow and they are and we're going to be at multiple trillions of these ETFs, it makes zero sense from a consumer protection perspective. And so we're seeing this with sophisticated treasury companies onboarding with us. But to your point, sadly, it's going to really take a big deleveraging um where I think where it becomes part of like just natural audit and like processes where you can't park clients capital in something that because at the end of the day, it's just three Coinbases or three anchorages. Like if somebody on boards today, we have multiple qualified custodians. They don't even need on-ramp to participate. We can coordinate, provide all the thing, have a unified experience, but we're that early that nobody gets fired from going to Coinbase. B the status quo is sticky. This is the same reason where we do these pods every week because people listen and they tell us, "Okay, finally I got it. Finally, I got it." Like, I'm doing my diligence. I'm listening. I'm picking up. I'm getting it. And the reality is it just takes time because custody is ultra sticky. And it really takes a jolting whether it's a family member getting sick, somebody getting sick, realizing I got to get my affairs in order, the neighbor getting their house broken into, the wildfires, the floods, like all these things naturally because at a certain time um you feel good about it. But then market forces in the the thing I tell our team is independent of anything the market does or anything we do. We're doing things at the margins for adoption of what we're talking about here because I've seen this firsthand, the market will do everything for us. Meaning the price will rise and people will get uncomfortable and then we'll be ready with open arms for them because I saw this happen in 21 and 22 when the price went from those bands of 17 to 20. Everyone was fine with their custody. Second Sailor and Ross and everyone aped in a Q4. That's when we added billions of dollars. And similarly here, we're still in this weird band of 70 to 100 where people still feel confident in what they have set up. The sad part is that's when mistakes happen because they haven't thought through well who where is it sitting? What's happening in the underlying but as it goes to 140 150 180 now they get concerned. But the problem is on the other side of that that's also when counterparty risk is being inserted into the market because all this liquidity is coming in. the animal spirits are are at its highest peak and so people are just blowing up left and right and then that's when everyone seeks fault tolerant decentralized redundant solutions and so that's if anybody's curious of our our strategy is like we just keep talking about this and we'll be here when you're ready >> so I really enjoy my work here at on-ramp and the reason is because I get to work with people like you get to spend a lot of my time having conversations with individuals businesses and so on that are looking to navigate Bitcoin and I find it rewarding because of everything we discuss on this show. You know, Bitcoin is really a way to protect your time, your energy, your wealth, and it is fulfilling to be able to help people do so. And so, the latest part in doing that here at On-Ramp is launching on-ramp guardian, which we discussed at the end of the episode. And really the way I would distill that is enhancements around our multi-institution custody solution so that you can protect yourself, you can protect your family against digital threats, physical threats. This is only going to get worse and it's it's really not FUD. I mean, it's objective. As Bitcoin continues to appreciate, there's more awareness around it. The stakes are higher. So, unfortunately, attacks are just going to become more sophisticated and more common. And I feel confident that we have the best solution to mitigate as many attacks as possible, eliminate a lot of threat vectors. So if you're not familiar already, you can go to our website and check out on-ramp guardian. It's included in all of our client accounts and I think you'll get a lot of value out of it. Before we let you off the hook, Jesse is Michael said when the price is higher, people come to, you know, come to their senses and understand multi- institution. Is this the price going higher or is 124k the top for this year? >> Oh man, you're going to put me on the spot. I think it's the price is going higher. I have no idea over what time frame or how high, but much higher. >> Good answer. >> That's my prediction. >> Answer. >> So, this isn't the top of a cycle though, basically. >> There is no top. >> Michael, I'm sticking I'm sticking with my answer. I don't I don't need you pressuring me here. Yeah. >> Yeah. I I respect it, Jesse, because one time >> What's the phrase people like? There's There's no top because Fiat has no bottom. Just go with that one. >> That's That's a good answer. I like that. >> Perfect. >> We We might need to find a new host if Brian says that again on the last trade. >> Next time he's going to pull up the Neo. What is the Matrix one of like what is it? Like, are you telling me I can exchange these for dollars? Um no maybe before we wrap curious Jackson and Brian because I think like this is something we haven't talked about there's a lot of discussion around you know from the thought leaders um like there's a top and you know or we're there and whatever like what are your guys where do you guys see this going you don't have to call like your price but where do you see the extension of um I think we'd all agree like there is some cycle it doesn't just like it's not going to it is obviously going to go forever but there's going to be um natural business like crypto bitcoin cycles. Where do you how long do you think this kind of like bull market goes? >> I kind of I kind of think at this point like in my mind the market structure has has changed meaningfully in the sense that over the past call it 6 to 12 months we've seen this sort of sideways chop to abbreviated upside to again sideways chop to abbreviated upside. that is pretty different than than prior cycles in terms of what we are calling a bull market. And so my sort of base case at this point is like that's what is going to continue to happen as all of these um channels and the plumbing of institutions getting allocated continues to increase. Like we've talked about this in the past like yes while the ETFs are the most successful products like the plumbing and and people's access to these things is still limited and restricted in in many cases. And so that's only going to continue to widen. Um, and so I kind of expect to see this same sort of chopolidation slightly upwards until if and until like in my mind what causes the end of a cycle per se is actually probably not related to crypto necessarily or even Bitcoin. Like to me it's some sort of black swan or broader market like macro deleveraging that you know in a in a certain short time frame correlations go to one and Bitcoin de levers as well but then it's the fastest horse out of whatever that looks like. That's kind of my base case like I don't and maybe it's the treasury company stuff maybe it's you know real alt season leverage that does uh contribute to more of an internal um deleveraging event. it. I could see that happening as well. But my sort of base case at least through the end of the year is like we see more of the same of what we saw for the past six to 12. >> Yeah, I would just add as well that we really haven't seen a bull market because if we if we're men of our word and we stick to our guns with earlier in the conversation with gold and using gold as the denominator for the Bitcoin price, we we're actually at not at all-time highs right now. And so if you look, I believe it was December of 2024 where Bitcoin did set an new all-time high priced in gold. Now we're down about 15 or 20%. And that's a combination of Bitcoin being down and gold being up big time this year. Um, so I don't know. I think we we have much higher to go. And then you guys may recall as well last cycle all the Bitcoin naysayers were very confident that Bitcoin was going to be crushed under higher interest rate policy. It was, you know, it was only an asset that could survive under Zerp uh that existed post GFC. And so I mean that's all been dispelled. We're pretty much at pretty much in a bare market right now for Bitcoin. And we haven't even seen um you know rates come lower. We have the tensions building between the government and the central bank. They they actually are one, you know, one entity for people who are not convinced of that, but they they like to pretend that they're two different things. But we're starting to see in real time that there's an acknowledgement that these are one entity and that because of the fiscal situation of the US government, the hand will be forced of monetary policy. So yeah, I mean I I think it goes higher but considerably uh in dollar price and I wonder what happens if you denominate it in gold, but I think also new all-time highs priced in gold this year as well. >> Yeah, at the risk of being insanely wrong, uh I I'm beginning to believe with a 20 to 30% chance, if not greater, um this is what people would talk about as a super cycle. >> And let's go. And the reason the reason the reason why I think it's a confluence of things and Jackson hit on some of them but the the base case that we've talked about before about super cycle would be if sovereign stepped in to bid and then there would be a natural because that's just persistent and then also what are they selling for and I think gold being the canary sovereigns are already bidding BTC they're bidding gold first and they will naturally step in to BTC and if we believe Bitcoin's going to 1 to $10 million um in dollar terms. Obviously 1 million from 100k is not like the hard part is getting from zero to one and one to 10 or one to 100k 100k to a million is not is not the hard part. And um what leads me to say that as well is because to Jackson's point from the retail setup where we've been in a bare market there's very few retail investors stepping in. You could see it on onchain when everyone's like screaming which is a different story about like the the fees like that's not an issue but like the fact that these flows have been in the ETFs and the digital asset treasury companies but I think that's part of market mechanics at play because people have been in the same way gold was kind of like messed with and everyone understood it and it's kind of like broken out of that is Bitcoin somewhat like I don't want to say paper Bitcoin but there's just a notion of the the the Bitcoin price is staying in bands because people are accumulating and when the reflexivity comes that's when retail comes. That's ultimately right because the time cycle should be they should be here based on like havingings and where the demand is but it hasn't come in because retail is ultimately a proxy for the price um movement and they naturally step in. So we're still haven't even seen that and um so you take all that together along with sovereign debt crisis the cat's out of the bag because gold's already showing it. the the theme and the zeitgeist of gold being at play, Bitcoin already with the ETFs. Um, I do see it as a completely different ballgame we step in and at a very minimum, I'd make the bet that this extends deep into 26 and 27 as far as Bitcoin's price appreciation. Um, but the other side of that will be very bearish because you're going to be a lot of Bitcoin lost and we'll all call it, oh, animal spirits and it's not. it would be something else and I won't go into it here but uh yeah it's just place your bets accordingly but also protect your asset because um protect your ass and your asset because uh you know like it's just my my my case that I've been running with is 2021 and two was the draw run for whatever we're seeing here. So the exuberance and the price appreciation was just like the the test test run and everything's been set in place whether it's legislation we talk about offshore derivatives getting pushed back in tether you know we got Larry uh not Larry uh what is it Lutnik you know deep inside tether we got like everything's in place to really let this thing eventually finally rip um and it's going to rip >> what you're saying Michael if I can parse if I can parse that monologue Like if if the sovereigns step in in size, they prevent any top from happening. Basically, >> if the sovereigns step in in size, we go higher than anybody's expecting and we don't go lower. We don't go as low as people are expecting, which is a traditional like 80% draw down and like 170 top. It's going to be fundamentally different than that. >> And Bitcoin becomes and gold or just back to like what we talked about here. Growman's conservative end up as 10 to 20% of people's portfolio because the persistent inflation just become part of the narrative that you protect your assets with hard money and that is uh the definition at least in my mind of a super cycle because you're not like trading Bitcoin and institutions aren't exit liquidity. They're literally coming in to protect and it just becomes part of like the sovereign like Harvard buying their $und00 million allocation. what like Harvard buying their $und00 million allocation is really interesting because now you have them looking at the asset at least in an objective way. Theoretically they should be and then it's like well what are you going to sell it for? You're going to go buy like some more venture or you're going to go buy some like private credit that's insolvent like what are you going into? And I think that's what's come out of the bag in the past 12 months. And as more of this proliferates and permeates like these institutional walls and just general investors, it's like, well, where why are you going to sell for more dollars to like that's what I think the definition of a a super cycle is? Is you're just like there's no it's it's funny because that chart and like the Weimar stuff and the the BTC, they all like mimic the same thing. It's like you see the volatility, then eventually you just kind of like go parabolic. No one told us that the s super cycle would be so boring. [Music] [Laughter] >> It It's funny because what I think the last piece where I I shared that was I was looking at the price chart as as one does and uh it was it was a little bit before this little retrace, but it kind of starts to look like you're kind of just like staring like the stairway to heaven. Uh because here like when you look at these other bull markets, you kind of go and then you kind of retrace and even here, but this is like just fundamentally different and the time scale is different. Um and so to your point, that looks boring because you're just watching uh it's just it's in it's in our version of slow motion. And to Jackson's point, 100 years is pretty like short time horizon, but when you can watch a Tik Tok video to learn about, you know, whatever crazy conspiracy you want in 15 seconds, like uh you know, uh 3 months or 6 months into this this trend feels like ages. >> Can I give a plug for Guardian in this context? So, I I really think the biggest >> What is Guardian, Jesse? >> No, you tell me. Michael or Jackson, why don't you guys or >> Yeah, I mean I I could I could jump in real quick. I I >> I'm supposed to join a client call right now. I'm supposed to pick up the I'm supposed to pick up the paint roller and actually do some work, but um you guys can carry on without me. The the short of it is Guardian is really just additional protections around multi-institution custody that I think really do a great job of protecting people against digital and physical threats. Um, so really just giving people more peace of mind and confidence really ties into, you know, if Michael's right, Super Cycle. I was already laughing because I could picture like the thumbnail of this podcast is just like Michael like pointing to like Super Cycle with his mouth open. But uh, if he's right, you're going to need some better protection for for your your better money. But all right, guys. Carry on without me, please. Am I am I able to join or leave with you guys still recording? >> You should be. Yeah, just leave without ending it. All right, Jackson. >> And we haven't really actually discussed it deeply, but at the the very concise level, Guardian was created in the same way what um we look at his broken market structure when we go to a family office like I referenced yesterday and they say that three people have to sell their Bitcoin to go into an inferior solution because they're afraid that their kids are going to get kidnapped. Like in our view that's just a broken sign of the market because ultimately nobody's worried about their stock portfolio, their bonds getting liquidated, sold, being kidnapped, get in a duffel bag, like the person's caught by then, >> right? And so while multi-institution is world class segregated institutions, video verification, offline chartered keys, you naturally want additional provisions in place whether there's uh inherent weekly annual time locks, additional authentications to FA using AI to combat AI in the sense of liveless checks to make sure that it's a real person along with some other features. But the real point is not only do clients have the ability to turn that on, but you start to uh as on-ramp in multi institution, we won't be the only people doing this and we know of others building it will proliferate. Bad actors and individuals will realize well if Jesse's a client of on-ramp and he has guardian uh turned on and there'll be even things we haven't launched yet where you'll send emails to them and explain like your provisions or if they lock in the account you can make it available. stuff a bad actor because that's usually how people get access first. It's through social engineering of your email or your just your credentials. They'll just realize like I can't do anything like physically I can't. It's a 7-day whatever the periods are and then that ultimately becomes part of the market understanding that I just don't kidnap people that have Bitcoin because it's not in their direct control to do it. So that's in a in a summary Guardian and why we launched that a few weeks ago. >> Yeah, that's great. I think and I think you hit on like the the most beneficial use of it which is to protect from kind of outside threats, third party threats, but I think there's also protection from uh investor psychology and protection in a bull run. If you can't wait 7 days to like pull the trigger and sell your Bitcoin, let's say you think it's a top, then you shouldn't be selling your Bitcoin in my opinion. And so I think I think that's an added benefit because I think the biggest risk in a bull market or to underperformance is actually the individual just screwing up and making a mistake and getting staying spending too much time on Twitter and looking at the M2 chart relative to Bitcoin and uh screwing themselves out of of uh generational wealth. It's so funny you say that because um I don't know how like there's there's something there in a deep cold storage and there's a time to move the asset versus if it just sits on an exchange definitely right like if it's in any kind of self-custody it takes time without killing any confidence and this is this is partially why we I was excited about the show launching two years ago was where I really liked allin was those guys are operators they might be [ __ ] in some respects but they like actually operate businesses they're in the market they're in the quoteunquote arena like So when they when they show up, you're hearing insights generally from like boardrooms and how people are thinking and you don't really get that a lot because you usually get either side of the spectrum. You get people that are pure pontificators and they're they're podcasters but they're not actually building like in the weeds. So then it's like what they're saying is not necessarily kind of like you know have has the best lens. And then the other side is you don't have Jamie Diamond or Abby Johnson on podcast. You really never get a peak into their deal. So point being is just this past week this what you just shared Jesse actually happened. Um had to move money sizable allocation you know it is what it is going into the trade desk and price reverted came back right because everything out there is telling the story of top is in and you have to think about it through the lens. There's plenty of people listening they're like well how can somebody think like that? But the reality is people have stepped into this market at 60, 70, 80, 90K. They're sitting on some decent gains, maybe 100. It's their wealth. It's material wealth allocated to Bitcoin. They're seeing all the global macro stuff. They're seeing all the trends. They're hearing everybody on Twitter stats, blah blah blah blah. And it's like, oh, maybe I want to realize I think and that time that it took to move into to get it like to the signing process, all that. It's like, hey, I want to cancel this. >> Cuz I kind of assume like that's what it was cuz you never seen Yeah. Yeah, because we have a very sticky product. So, like, you know, um it's always weird when you see large amounts moving and you're always like, you know, whatever. But it's it's it's an investor's um they can do whatever. It's their money, but uh you just hit the nail on the head. It's a very interesting dynamic on psychology. And uh the sad part is like it's still not hard to move the money. It may take an extra day or two, but to your point, it's very different if it's just sitting on Gemini. Part of the biggest thing that I've enjoyed being just all in for a while is like I remember when I first got in I was like trading around the market and not really trading around the market but like can I get a better entry price you know some of the most stressful time in my life of like for a year just moving in and then out and like you see it and then you lost some Bitcoin because you thought it was going to retrace. It's like you just got to like protect it and then just go away and I think that's what you're hinting at there. >> Yeah, exactly. And that's where I see like the downside of ETFs to be honest. It's like I love that it has opened up um it provided access to Bitcoin to some people that wouldn't otherwise buy Bitcoin, but it also is just like a click of a button to um in when someone gets scared to to sell and have kind of no fundamental basis or no kind of plan for what they're doing um over the long term. you'll love uh we we should wrap but um you'll love like so we have this like 365 day time lock where somebody says like for 365 days you can't move the assets out of the vault and uh that actually stemmed partially from I think somebody came out it was like some third party or it was a product that was like you can never get access to the bitcoin but it can never leave uh the like vault it was like some tradi product I forget what it was it was like one of IRA companies, but >> it was like it it can only move if it if you basically sell it to dollars and then the dollars show up in your bank account. >> So it's to prevent move like losses from hacks. So theoretically the Bitcoin should never leave the solution. It should only go to dollars. And I was like that's interesting because in the in the perception of the client, I could see how that's super valuable because you're basically downside protecting any Bitcoin being lost and then people that are, you know, want dollars. And so that's kind of where this stem from is like you can lock up for 365. But the kicker is that you can unlock it, but we have branches, you know, across the country and whoever is in whatever geographical reason region, they would meet somebody from on-ramp, validate that it's them. They're not addressed, they would be able to unlock it. But you just made me think of we should do that is also for trading. It's like you uh you have to like go, you know, meet. So you have time, you have like a get on a flight and think about your decision. Um and so yeah, there's a lot of interesting things. Um yeah. Yeah, you should make them do something like they have to do something super embarrassing before they can unlock it. Like they have >> jump on the last trade and jump on the last trade and explain their >> a chicken costume or something like that. >> That's actually great. >> Oh, >> well Jesse, we very much appreciate you joining us. Um, anything you want to plug, follow? You looking for new clients? Anything like that? >> You're you're trying to get in. You want to pump? I'm >> trying to pull Look, I got Yeah, I got early entry into all the dats, so just buy them all. Just kidding. Don't clip that, anybody. Um, no, thank you guys. I I enjoyed the conversation and I uh always enjoy hearing you guys hearing your thoughts. >> Awesome. >> Well, thanks for joining us and um I'll do Jackson's job for him here at the end. Please like, subscribe, leave a comment, uh yell at Jackson if you want. Um >> Oh, yeah. If you made it this far and Jackson's not on, you should uh we should tell folks to do something cuz they listen. They like to to leave comments. Um, >> should we start a GoFundMe for his house purchase? >> Yeah, maybe that's the comment. If you if you listen this far, just comment and say, um, we're glad the guy set up a GoFundMe and you want to contribute. And uh and if if if if more than five people do that, I promise I will set up the GoFundMe and next week I will post the link uh and I'll maybe match any contributions uh to Jackson's GoFundM. >> All right, guys. We'll appreciate it. We'll see you next week. >> Thanks, Jesse. >> Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that Onra Media is forformational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are in your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com/cont to schedule a consultation with one of our private client adviserss.