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- [00:00]
A
There are a lot of people in the retail world who look at Stretch and they're like, wow, this is just like a money market, except it pays more than 3x what a money market is going to pay. But it's very dangerous in my mind to think like that because Stretch is not a money market. It absolutely is not a money market. Even though it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is not a duck. And I worry people are going to get into trouble chasing that. Hey, I say when we sell.
- [00:32]
B
We are back. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Last Trade. It is my pleasure to have Vijay Boyapati, the esteemed author of the seminal piece the Bullish Keys for Bitcoin, one of my favorites. For anyone who has not read the book before, or at least the article, stop what you're doing and make sure you read that. Vijay, good to see you. Thanks for coming on the show. How are you doing?
- [00:55]
A
Thanks for having me, guys. Good to be with you.
- [00:58]
B
Michael, good to see you as well. Thank you for showing up today, doing good.
- [01:02]
C
I know it's been a weird couple weeks. I don't remember the last time I've joined a pod. So I'm excited to be here, and I know we're gonna have a pretty good conversation.
- [01:10]
D
Excellent.
- [01:11]
B
Well, thank you, Vijay. Right before we hit record here, we were just talking about how sentiment is quite poor, and I think it's particularly challenging right now because at least I'm referring to it as the everything but bitcoin rally. So everything is seemingly up and to the right besides bitcoin. And so, at least in my experience, I haven't been around quite as long as you or Michael have in being involved in bitcoin. But I've been around long enough, call it five, six years now. And this, I feel like, is even more painful than previous bear markets that I've experienced. I think. I don't know how you feel we're going to get into that in just A second, but 2022, at least everything was blowing up. There were clear catalysts. We had a lot of excess, a lot of shenanigans to work through as an industry to get to the other side of that. But right now, it just seems that everything besides bitcoin is really having a field day. I mean, the equity markets continue to rip higher despite uncertainty in the Middle east and particularly in the AI, the semis. Everything is just ripping higher. And yet you have bitcoin that's just been stagnant and just having a really challenging year. And so I would love to hear what you make of it because I know you're a veteran, you've seen a number of cycles at this point. So could you help put a little bit context behind just where things are today? How does it compare to some of the past bear markets that you've lived through?
- [02:28]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's certainly disappointing. I think it's always important to recognize reality and it's disappointing. Bitcoin isn't. I think it's fair to acknowledge it's in a bear market right now. I know this might not, you know, help many people feel better, but I think it's actually quite a shallow bear market. You know, we've had, you know, it's entirely possible that we go lower, but I, I feel fairly confident that the bottom is in. I think sentiment got so negative and if, if it is the case that the bottom is in, a 50% drawdown is actually pretty shallow bear market. Given bitcoin's history. It does, it does feel disappointing because of these other assets doing well. And I think, you know, especially when the bear market started October last year, precious metals were doing really well. And it's, it was kind of crazy. It's like, why is gold doing well in bitcoin not doing well? I think in the short term, bitcoin is really driven by narratives like that. You know, there's these very negative narratives that we've gone through over the last few months and one of them was like this quantity quantum fud1 is that Bitcoin's not relevant anymore. Gold is like, gold is on the ascendancy. We don't need bitcoin. Gold is back. But in the long term, bitcoin is, the price level is really determined by the adoption story. It's adoption that really matters over the long term. And adoption really is driven by fundamentals. It's not as closely tied to these short term sentiment shifts that happen that drive markets in the period of like weeks to months. And adoption really comes from the fundamentals of bitcoin being able to do things that its competitors can't do. I can send you bitcoin, right, as easily as I can send an email. I can't do that with gold. And that has fundamental value. It has value to people who have to cross borders, who have to escape oppressive regimes. Bitcoin's also strictly limited in supply. That's also something that you don't have with either fiat currencies or with gold. Those fundamentals will shine through over the long term, short term, you know, we're in a bear market and it feels crappy. It feels crappy in particular because other things, like you say Jackson are doing really well. I wouldn't say that that's entirely unique. 2018, 2019, there was a market correction as well. And, you know, 2021, 2022, there was like the. The market was correcting as well because the Fed policy. So bitcoin was going down while the market was going down. But go back to 2014, 2015, the market was doing pretty well then, too, but bitcoin was just getting hammered. Bitcoin dropped from, I think, about 1100 down to ultimately $170. And to me, that's still by far the most painful bear market because we had prominent, a very prominent developer, Mike Hearn Rage, quitting very publicly in the New York Times and saying, bitcoin's dead. This whole project is dead. And we didn't have a history of cycles. We didn't really know maybe bitcoin's going to come back. There was the possibility that bitcoin was actually dead. It felt like maybe it is dead, but it was resilient and it came through that. And then we got to the 2017 bull market. So to me, that's like, what we're going through now is not unprecedented. And in a lot of ways, I think the current setup for bitcoin is way more bullish than anything that we've seen in the past. We have institutional adoption, we have ETFs, we have major financial institutions integrating bitcoin into their platform. So an example of this is Charles Schwab, that they're building a crypto trading platform for 40 million of their clients. That's a big deal. Now, that doesn't happen immediately. That's going to roll out, and the exposure to these clients is going to take some time. But that's part of the adoption story, right? And that's the. The effect of that on price is going to take months and years. So my view is, yeah, bitcoin is underperforming for sure. That's the truth. But when it starts getting its mojo back and we start moving back into a bull market, then it's going to catch up and more. This is the classic behavior of bitcoin in a bear market. You have the crash, you have fear and desperation, and then you get this kind of prolonged plateau, which is the eventual reaching of Apath. And I've written about this. I have a long thread on Twitter from I think it's 2018, which is very Appropriate to now, which is this, this is just going to take time. You have to work through the apathy. And then when you get to the point where you have apathy and bitcoin hasn't died, you start getting these green shoots of people thinking, well, bitcoin hasn't died. I'll get a small allocation. The price starts slowly but steadily creeping up. The interesting thing for me though is that process has seems to be accelerated because of the effect of Michael Saylor. He's in the market buying a billion dollars of bitcoin effectively every week. So he's almost engineering the green shoots single handedly. So this period of apathy and the prolonged plateau, is it going to last as long as it has in the past a year? It could, but it could also be accelerated. I think there's a possibility that Saylor by himself is able to accelerate that period.
- [08:48]
C
It's very well said. I have a couple things to call out and maybe to play a little devil's advocating, here are your thoughts to make it spicy because I haven't listened to bitcoin pods in a while, but I'm sure they all sound similar, not from you, but just in general about where we're at and nobody knows and when the price is going to go up. But before going into that, I do want to call out, I think anybody that's looking at different portfolio allocations and seeing the Nvidias or the semiconductors or memory chips or hyper liquid. There's the reality of opportunity cost. And this is how I sell myself into just staying, you know, stacking stats and you know, relaxing is that you ultimately have the opportunity cost of being out of the market. But also you can't eat these things like what you're referencing. There's a difference between a money and a savings and an investment. And that we know. I think almost anybody that's being truthful, the fundamentals are dislocated. So you're chasing momentum and narratives across whatever you're going to be investing in and you're hoping that those narratives are there. And I don't know if I can sleep at night investing my family's capital on a narrative versus what I know to your point is fundamentally sound. So I think that's the thing that gets lost. It's not necessarily apples and to oranges that what you chase. Sure you can have a nominal gain, but in real terms, are you actually going to stack more bitcoin, Especially being out of the market, we know that time in the market is the thing that matters.
- [10:07]
A
Yeah, especially with bitcoin, if you take away, you know, those few days when bitcoin has its big rallies, you, you lose a lot of the performance. So you need to, you really need to be holding it long term. I think it's also fair and worth being honest and admitting like there has been this opportunity cost of holding bitcoin over the last few years because of the AI rally. Like you could argue theoretically, if you perfectly timed it and you sold Bitcoin in 2021 when it was say 65k or 60k and went all in on Nvidia or all in on Google or something like that, you'd be better off. That's, that's just a fact. But timing those things is incredibly hard. And another thing to look at is like you can sort of look at that with 2020 hindsight, but today, like there is so much FOMO with AI that there's a risk that you're kind of buying the blow off top. It's really hard. These things are so hard to time because at the same time there is a very fundamental story to AI as well. This is a very, very transformative, important technology. But with any technology, markets always get ahead of themselves. And when I started my career and started investing in my early 20s, it was the dot com bust and there was a fun is a fundamental story to the Internet, right? But the market got so far ahead of, ahead of itself and then it imploded and really took several years before it started recovering the same thing. I guarantee you the same thing is going to happen with AI. It's not clear when that blow off top is. And like, are we in the equivalent right now with AI of like 1997 or maybe it's 1999? It's not clear where we are. And I think also these IPOs that are going to come onto the market could potentially have a big negative impact for the market because you have so much capital, sorry, so much equity that's going to be dumped onto the market where you have insiders in SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI who are all going to be dumping trillions of dollars of their equity onto the market. And the market has to absorb that, right? And where does that money come from? Something else is going to have to be sold to, to absorb that valuation. So when you have that much equity coming onto the market, that's that often marks kind of a local top. So I think it's really hard to chase AI right now long term. I think AI is a really important story and I Think it's going to be just like the Internet was, you know, during the 2000s. Like there was a blow off top, there was a massive crash and then after like a cooling down period, you're going to see just a steady increase in value over time. This is classic Gartner hype cycle, right? This is, this is also what Bitcoin does. It goes through these Gartner hype cycles. It just happens to do them repeatedly.
- [13:16]
C
Yeah, I think, I think the blow off top, it'll be interesting to watch what's happening in Iran and then OpenAI and SpaceX's IPO, because you naturally need that liquidity if you're going to have any form of success. So I'm cautious in how I bring this up. So I'm not saying I believe this, but I want to throw out that there's a non zero chance and, and this goes back to the ETFs being approved. I think I've mentioned this a few times. But to build on the premise that in 22 a lot of the traditional financial firms looked at coinbase as a web3 company, they wanted nothing to do with it. So like the Citadels, the blackrocks of the world working in this space, you hear that they have their clients that want exposure to Bitcoin, but they didn't want to interface with Coinbase. If you go back to that world of 22, when everyone's blowing up, there's no difference between Coinbase in their mind than blockfi, Celsius, Genesis, like they all kind of look the same. How do they diligence what they are? And the point in bringing that up is, call it 23. When the ETFs were tentatively announced and approved and Coinbase was like deemed as this safe actor that you can park your assets, they had highlighted that it was grayscale, that the lawsuit was the reason. And it never really sat right with me because that lawsuit could have happened either time. So I'm just building on a premise. I'm not saying I believe it, but I kind of do. So ETFs get launched and they absorb a bunch of, I think pent up demand. Because the core concept here is I don't necessarily believe we got ever a true bull run from empirical standards, like from whether it's the amount of transactions in the most recent bull run compared to 22, I think it was double in 21 bull run, like 50 trillion on transactions on the blockchain versus like 25 new adopters from anecdotes from your friends and family that never had any exposure. How many calls did you get in the most recent run up to entrepreneurs coming in the space. That's a great hero stick from like net. New people that are coming in now. AI absorbs some of this. But so you go down this like list and I never felt like we got a true blow off top, which is like the reflexivity that gets the momentum in. And it's always felt a little inorganic in what we're experiencing right now. And a few of those things, there's the 1010 drawdown that nobody can actually point to. I don't necessarily know how many times that we've had a liquidity crunch in crypto where nobody could point to an ex thing that like basically fractured the market. Since 1010, we. That was a dislocation. MSTR is absorbing an insane amount of bitcoin and you have this like price peg that's just kind of sitting between these bands. And I've been thinking about this a while and then I heard Grumman bring this up about what this stuff might look like with inflation running is you have stocks, you have equities and also bonds, you know, kind of like running. And then you would have like gold and bitcoin sit kind of like in this. Because we know that, you know, gold, at least in a shorter time horizon, can potentially be manipulated because they're. For a number of reasons. I won't speculate why, but one of them is that they are these canaries and they are these like smoke signals in the market that you don't necessarily want them going to $200,000. And so I'm just throwing that out mainly because I find it hard. This is the first time and haven't been around as long as you. But like everyone feels like we're in this weird unchartered territory because to your point, I think where a lot of not even the apathy, but a lot of the like defeat has come from is 2025 gave everyone everything they ever dreamed of in this space and the price didn't do what they expected. And so I'm just curious if you have any thoughts there, because I just basically, I'm not sold on the premise that it's in a. We like kind of broke the traditional cycle in the last run. Am I in my.
- [16:49]
A
Yeah, I mean, I personally think the rationale, the reason that we didn't go all the way that many of us or most of us predicted, including myself, I thought we were going to go somewhere to between 150 and 200k in the cycle. I think most of that can be attributed to just a massive distribution of supply from whales. And the reason I think that happened was that 100k was a very important psychological milestone for a lot of people who'd been in the space. And bitcoin's kind of, it's odd in a sense. It's like its attributes make it as a financial instrument close to gold. But the ownership base is nothing like gold. The ownership base is kind of like a startup, right? It's a bunch of early insiders in a way, who have a big chunk of the supply. Like they still have a relatively large chunk of the supply. I don't know what percentage it is, but a lot of that was sold when we got to 100k. I mean, there are public reports of whales selling multiple billions of dollars. One individual Galaxy reported sold $9 billion worth of Bitcoin. That's a huge distribution of supply. Short term, what that does is that stalls the price, right? Like you have all this demand, it's like pushing bitcoin's price up, but then you've got this massive wall of supply that's being unloaded onto the market. So short term that, that it puts up this barrier to pushing, pushing the price higher. But long term, that's actually good because that supply is now distributed into the hands which has a much, much higher cost basis. Like those whales had a cost basis of zero, effectively. And now bitcoin, that bitcoin, the, you know, tens or perhaps even up to $100 billion worth of Bitcoin is in the hands of people who, whose basis is like 80k, 90k, 100k and a lot of those. I think we should give credit to the people who have bought through the ETFs. They've been incredibly solid holders of bitcoin. And why is that the case? Because I think the ETF is, is the, the kind of, it's the pipeline to Tradfi capital, Tradfi retail capital. People who have a portfolio at Vanguard or they have a portfolio at Fidelity and they, they heard about bitcoin and they wanted some allocation, right? Those people are thinking, I want 3% of my portfolio in Bitcoin or maybe 5% or if they're super aggressive. And this is what basically E. Morgan Stanley's note to its clients. You should have 2% of your portfolio in bitcoin. If you want a moderate allocation, it should be 3% or 4%. If you want to be aggressive, it should be 7% or 8%. Now think of those folks who have gotten an allocation of 3% or 4% of their portfolio in Bitcoin. Bitcoin draws down 50%. They don't care. Their entire portfolio has dropped 2% right to them. That's like, that can happen in a day. In a regular portfolio, 60, 40 portfolio with stocks and bonds, you can have a drawdown of 2% in a day. That, that happens pretty frequently. So I think that's what makes those new holders really strong hands. It's that they've got a small allocation that they want to keep forever. It's just part of like a regular diversified portfolio. They're not people who have 50 or 70 or 95% of portfolio in bitcoin as the whales did, who were diversifying. Imagine you're a whale who has $9 billion of zero basis Bitcoin and you don't have anything else. You by definition become a weak hand, right? Like every drawdown of Bitcoin of 50% hurts like hell because that's all of your net worth and you're taking a huge hit. And the possibilities of what you can do with that, your, your wealth drop very significantly. So I, I think long term the distribution that happened at the end of 2025 or throughout 2025 was very, very healthy. I think it sets up a base. Once we get through the kind of psycho, the psychological period of apathy of the bear market, we have a very strong base to move much higher because of that distribution. Because if you're a whale and you had like, I mean I don't know if they had even more than $9 billion of Bitcoin, but imagine you sold $9 billion of Bitcoin. Your desire to sell more has dropped massively. Like if you have any more, you don't need more. You have enough liquidity forever. You could, you have enough liquidity, you can buy an NFL team. You don't feel that compulsion to be like oh man, bitcoin gets up to 150, 45k, then I'm going to dump even more. Like you don't. You can wait. You can wait till bitcoin gets to half a million or a million before you, you sell anymore. So I think that desire of whales selling a lot of it has been sated in this like last cycle on
- [22:22]
D
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- [22:48]
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- [22:58]
B
I think that makes a lot of sense. Vijay. And to pull a couple of the different threads together that we just spoke on, it seems like there's almost the inverse happening now where the blow off tops that would typically categorize Bitcoin and the broader crypto altcoin space have since pivoted into, let's say the more exciting or the more topical AI technology trades, the chip trade. And instead to your point, what has happened with Bitcoin is now it has become a little bit more boring. And the people who have gotten into Bitcoin now are those who are allocating through the ETFs. Ultimately the self directed capital right now is in the, if you want to call it a bubble you can, but it's in the AI market, right? And instead now with Bitcoin, the bigger opportunity, the slower opportunity though is a few percentage points going into Bitcoin over time, right? It's not months, it's a year, it's a year long process. It's a decade long process of first the ETFs turning on the access in 24 and now to your point, E trade. Other platforms Fidelity has been in a while have turned on access for or are turning on access. Schwab is another one for tens of millions of brokerage accounts to access the asset directly. And so I think what you're highlighting, at least what it sounds like for me, is there's been a little bit of an inverse of what has historically happened in this market where it has been those self directed investors in the bitcoin space that have created that euphoria, have created the blow off top conditions and instead it has become a more mature asset class where you have a few percentage points of much larger base of capital, tens of trillions of dollars just starting to allocate to Bitcoin. And still you have a lot of those firms that actually have not been able to turn on access fully. So is that a fair categorization of the dynamic that's currently at play?
- [24:48]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I think that was a good summary, Jackson. I think one thing to think about now is Bitcoin has achieved a large enough scale that you're not going to see angel investing type returns. Like if you, if you hit a home run with an angel investment, you could make a hundred or a thousand x. I think you're not going to see that with bitcoin anymore. I do think bitcoin is still going to significantly outperform the market over time. You know, the, the broad market you can expect from the broad market like 10 to 15% per year. I think you're going to see much, much higher AR from, from bitcoin and I still think you could expect to see, you know, a 5 to 10x from Bitcoin over a fairly short time horizon, like five years. I don't think you're going to see that from the market which I feel like is pretty richly valued. But you know, if you are smart enough to find the next anthropic that, that is going to outperform Bitcoin, like you are not going to get the kind of, you know, 2011 to 2014 type returns in bitcoin anymore just because it's achieved such scale. And that's fine. Bitcoin is now a mature asset. It still has a lot of growth in it because its nearest competitor is gold and gold is like 20x bigger than bitcoin. So there's still a billion, very, very large total addressable market that I think bitcoin will capture over the next say 10 years.
- [26:24]
B
I think it's a great comparison you make to it. Michael, you alluded to it earlier where really bitcoin isn't meant at this point to be compared to these individual tech companies that are just moving, let's say hundreds of billions of dollars in a couple of months. That's clearly a retail, it's a retail driven phenomena that eventually will end. Eventually that euphoria dwindles. What you're comparing it to, Vijay, is right now the equities or The S&P 500 is the savings vehicle of the United States and even for capital outside of the US as well. It's one of the de facto ways that people just want to preserve their purchasing power. And if you compare bitcoin, which is actually truly a savings technology from a fundamental perspective to the alternative, which is having SPY or VOO just having an ETF exposure, it is going to vastly outperform because the fundamentals or more aligned with what you'd want for a savings technology. Now if you feel like compelled to try to trade the latest individual ticker, you may outperform bitcoin, but most of us can't do that. I know I Can't do it. It'll take away from my ability to work. I'll just be distracted with what are the tickers doing today. And so I think that's important. And then also your point about gold that didn't move anywhere for eight or nine years after the 2011 top. It took 20, 29 years of pain for gold to even retrace the all time high. And then from 2020 to 2026 it added what like 20 trillion, $25 trillion of market cap vastly, vastly larger than bitcoin. And to your point, Bitcoin doesn't really need much liquidity for it to move a 5 to 10x. I am curious what may if there are specific catalysts you pay attention to or if you really just think it is at this point just broadening of exposure, broadening of portfolios from the traditional space allocating to get the next 5-10x or are there certain things that you're paying attention to, sort of of scale or similar proportion of what happened in 2020 that eventually led everything higher?
- [28:22]
A
I think it's just the adoption story. I'm looking for financial institutions to start integrating bitcoin. So the process of Charles Schwab rolling out their, their bitcoin trading platform, you know, these other financial institutions making bitcoin available to their clients or writing research notes saying hey, you should have some bitcoin in your portfolio, like Morgan Stanley is an example of this, that process is just gonna take time. It's gonna take two to three years. So that's really what I'm watching. At some point we're gonna get out of this bear market and then we're gonna get into the bull sentiment mode and then bitcoin's gonna catch up very quickly. Right. When bitcoin's in a bull market, it moves very quickly, very quickly. And that what's happening in the bear market, the kind of adoption story is going to be the base, the foundation for the next bull move. And I would say there's really nothing that strange about this bear market. There hasn't. It really falls within the parameters of previous bear markets, except that it's been much more shallow. So I think that we have, we're building a platform now to make the next bul and I think there's going to be a lot of new adoption that's going to happen in the next year. Just because these financial institutions are in the process of building out these platforms to give their clients access to bitcoin.
- [29:50]
C
Yeah, I think there's one. There's A key thing we've been discussing here that's worth emphasizing is like most of the inflows into these ETFs were self directed, not from advisors. And that kind of like facilitates both of what Vijay and I are saying in different respects because this is something we've been talking about. But then it came out from Amy at Morgan Stanley. She referenced that a hundred million dollars in inflow was all self directed. They haven't even gotten, they just started in the position of the, the prescriptive or like allocation based on risk profile. But that those ETF flows were the pent up demand from allocators that had not been able to allocate unless they were going to have to go to a Coinbase or a Buybit or wherever. And so they would rather wait until it was available in their brokerage. And that's where that in my view a little bit of a interesting way that we hit the top. Obviously there was a selling but we never got the reflexivity for that like volatility to get more and more people to demand it from the retail side meaning from like even the brokerages via an ETF. This was the people for the past 10 years that haven't had the vehicle to buy it that was like already there. That's why the success of the first whatever number 100 days were better than anything we've seen. We didn't see that reflexive volatility. But I do think there's a component of like options and like hedge funds that were arbiting it out to reduce that volatility that didn't bring in that traditional like run up so independent, organic, inorganic. But the point still stands. I think we're all saying is that once this thing moves you're going to have a bunch of more liquidity pools exposed as well as advisors that are equipped to talk about this asset class that just weren't available in 25. And that's going to be a bullish indicator as well as a bunch of other things that are going on right now.
- [31:37]
B
Yeah, another, another area I wanted to get into Vijay was when we, when we caught up over the summer, so not quite a year ago, but getting close to it, we were talking about just the US government's involvement in the bitcoin and digital asset space. And you had mentioned how 90% of the risk effectively had been taken out of bitcoin because for the longest time you just, we were not sure as an industry how the US government was going to approach bitcoin and the digital asset space. And for the most part, it had been antagonistic historically. And then that shifted with the Trump presidency. And I think in part why there were such high expectations in 2025 is that a lot of people saw Trump campaign in 24. A lot of those promises, or I'll say at least some of those promises were kept with freeing Ross, firing Gensler. A lot of the things that this industry wanted to see, but then some of the, I think bigger points that a lot of the industry were excited about or wanted to see play out didn't actually happen. I mean, the legislation did happen for the strategic Bitcoin reserve. But then we would hear for months on end about budget neutral ways to acquire bitcoin. We heard that there was going to be an audit of the US Government's holdings. And there were some other, say there were some other key narratives out there that were ultimately not delivered upon. And so now, well over a year into Trump's presidency, I think there's still some uncertainty about how things are going to proceed going forward. Of course, we have the Clarity act, which is, which is progressing. That's good to see in terms of just more of clarity. Right. And more regulation in this space that'll ultimately allow for more pools of capital to get allocated and for more participants to enter the market. And then we have continued to see for the past week or two now just more signaling that there's going to be announcements related to the strategic Bitcoin reserve. I am curious, Vijay, if there's anything notable that you're paying attention to as it relates to just the regulatory and the political side of bitcoin or. And how, you know, how would you say in the past year since we last spoke, how things progressed kind of in line or worse than your expectations at that point?
- [33:41]
A
Yeah, I think the thing that's important about the prior election is that bitcoin achieved political capture, as you say, that the state was. U.S. government was very antagonistic towards bitcoin prior to that election. And I think what we saw with that election, both with Trump coming to the bitcoin conference and bending the knee, and also another very notable event during the election was the removal of Sherrod Brown, who was the chair of the Financial Services Committee in the US Senate. I mean, he was a very, very powerful senator, entrenched incumbent, and the bitcoin slash crypto lobby really went after him and was able to unseat him. And I think that was a powerful message to everyone in Congress that if you are going to be antagonistic towards Bitcoin then there's a good chance that you're going to be unseated. And there was a tweet just recently by Paul Graham which had a very interesting chart of Silicon Valley and how Democrats going after crypto was the biggest own goal that they've ever had. Like Silicon Valley Valley is a very kind of left wing, liberal place or progressive place. And them going after crypto really shifted the valley to the right dramatically. So that political capture I think is very, very important. But the things you mentioned that were given by the Trump administration really didn't help with adoption. Right. Like Ross being freed is great. We all are happy about that. But that didn't, that is not something that changed adoption at all. Firing Gary Gensler, another thing that's great, that didn't change adoption at all. The strategic Bitcoin reserve, they didn't actually do anything. They just kind of said, hey, if we have bitcoin, we're not going to sell them. There was actual adoption. There was no, like, let's, as, you know, as the treasury accumulate more bitcoin, they didn't do anything about that. So the state has become less antagonistic, but they really haven't done anything for adoption. The adoption has come from industry, that's financial service players starting to provide tools for their clients to buy Bitcoin and also advising their clients to buy bitcoin. That's, that's the real adoption story. So I think it's positive that we have political capture. I mean, I think that takes the biggest risk off the table. I think the Clarity act is important because what it's going to do, it's going to accelerate the convergence of banking and the bitcoin industry. Like Bitcoin, financial services companies are becoming banks and banks are becoming kind of bitcoin financial service players, that there's a convergence of both of them and that's good for the industry. I think if the Clarity act passes, I believe it will pass. I think that's going to accelerate that process. So that will be a big milestone as well that I'm looking towards. But everything we've gotten so far from the government hasn't really helped adoption necessarily. It's just made it so the state is less actively antagonistic towards Bitcoin.
- [37:05]
C
It's great framing because I was listening to Arthur Hayes a few months ago and he referenced, he's like, clarity, genius. I don't care. This is a retail driven game, will always be a retail driven game. And you think about like monetization of a good, it's going to come from the Bottoms Up. And so retail, and retail is a large cohort but they sit at J.P. morgan, they sit at Goldman, they sit at Morgan Stanley. They've been demanding this. The banks know they can make fees and so they're going to figure out how to adopt it. And to your point around Clarity, I think it's really widely not understood that like Genius act helped on the stablecoin side. But there's like four different three letter agent bodies. OCC and FDIC are two. There's another two. But point being is that they've been so antagonistic to these firms that they need every like dot, you know, t cross dotted eyes to get the confirmation that they can touch custody before they're going to do it. Because we talked to them and they're still trying to wait for everything before because they're already pushing the boundaries on trying to get there and they need to be very careful. And I don't think that's fully appreciated by the market.
- [38:10]
A
Like yeah, that's a really important point Michael, because in very recent memory they felt very targeted if they did anything with crypto. They were threatened with losing their banking license. And like the hostility was so intense that a lot of these institutions felt terrified to do anything in the space. And I think that, you know, when you've been bitten by a dog, you feel a little shy for a while. Right. And I think these financial institutions, like you say, want everything to be set up. And I think the Clarity act will be a big step in that direction. It'll be like, okay, we have regulatory, a regulatory framework that we can rely on where we can go ahead and do this. I expect that's going to be done, you know, fairly shortly. In the next month or two the Clarity act is going to get passed and it's going to be signed by the President. So that's going to be I think a really big part of the acceleration of adoption. And like you say it is a ground up story that paves the way for more ground up adopt, ground up adoption as opposed to like I don't think the strategic Bitcoin reserve is going to happen in any meaningful way. It's really hard for the government or people in the government to justify. It feels like a big gamble. Although who knows, maybe it does come around. Like Trump is able to get, you know, a huge stake in intel and, and is, you know, regularly boasts about that. Like he'll point to the stock price of intel and say, look how much I've made for the federal government. So it's not completely outside the realm of possibility that they do accumulate some bitcoin. But I think it's a long shot. I think the big thing that we should be hop. Hoping for is the passing of the Clarity Act. And then a lot of these banks saying, hey, we're, we're ready to custody Bitcoin. And I think, you know, another thing that's important is these banks have seen, they've, they've, there's been a very powerful signal. They've looked over at blackrock and seen what's happened. They look at IBIT and it's the fastest growing ETF in history. And it's like a, it's a revenue driver for BlackRock. They realize that they want to get in the game. They're all profit motivated like nobody's business and they, they want to get in there and make those Prof. As well. So. But again, this all takes time. And that building out the platforms to help with adoption with this massive base of retail clients, I think that's a story that takes two to three years. So I feel confident about the adoption story. I think it's happening. I spoke to the guy who's leading the creation of the platform, the trading platform at Charles Schwab, and he's a hardcore bitcoiner. And he told me, you know, he was about to retire and the, the CEO of, of Charles Schwab asked him like, you know, what can I do to get you to stay? And he said, this is one thing I'm passionate about, is bitcoin and give me the freedom to build out a platform for Charles Schwab's clients. That kind of mindset is deeply embedded in, you know, a lot of financial institutions now. So you better believe that they're going to be pushing adoption when like that, who are working at places like Charles Schwab, who, they're the biggest broker in the country. Right. So I'm bullish on adoption. I know it sucks. We're in a bear market and like a bunch of people distributed their coins in, in the last bull market. But I mean, I'm so bullish about what's going to happen over the next two to three years. That, and I actually feel really grateful that we. This, this bear market, sorry, has been really mild. Like I've gone through some brutal be like I said was the absolute worst because it really felt like bitcoin might be dead. And, and that was also during a period when the stock market was rallying. It's like, God damn it, like bitcoin is just falling every single day. The most prominent people in the space are rage quitting, saying bitcoin is the project. Whole idea of bitcoin is dead because we can't get a block size increase. It was really bad. This isn't bad at all. Especially when you have someone like Saylor in there buying a dollars of bitcoin a week. We're going to be fine.
- [42:40]
B
We have to touch on the sailor thing in just a second. But I want to highlight something that you said because it actually is incredibly exciting to hear that the executive you mentioned that's heading up all this at Charles Schwab is in fact a bitcoiner. Not because of what most people would say, oh, that means, you know, bitcoin, it's going to start rallying. And once, blah, blah, blah. It's because typically five years or 10 years ago, if there was a bitcoiner who was within the ranks at an organization like Schwab, they were going to be ignored, of course. Right.
- [43:11]
A
Like, and they would be very junior. They would be very junior.
- [43:13]
B
They'd be junior. Yeah, they wouldn't be. They'd be junior. They'd be ignored. But the other aspect of this as well is if you're a bitcoiner within these organizations and not only are you a senior executive, but also all of your peers are now getting deeply involved in the space as well. I think of Amy as well at Morgan Stanley, who Michael knows, she's pretty much put her career on the line to build out the digital asset business at Morgan Stanley. And so if you're at Schwab and this is the only thing that's going to get you to stay, Schwab is going to say yes, because they see all of their peers are generating a lot of revenue, a lot of bottom line for their companies and their clients are demanding it. So the dynamics totally shifted in the past even couple of years at this point. And so that's encouraging as well. And I do think we need to touch on what's happening with strategy because. Because even though the sentiment online is quite poor, I think a lot of the conversation has been drowned out by these themes of digital credit. And strategy is really the last man standing in the bitcoin treasury company space. And Vijay, when you were last on, we were talking a bit how. I think you said something to the effect of that bitcoin treasuries were going to be the reason why the market blew up. Now, I don't know if they necessarily were. Maybe they were, you Tell me. But once the market started to blow up in the fall, all the, A lot of these companies became for sellers. And so a lot of the companies that Michael and I were speaking with 12 months ago have sold a lot of, or not potentially all of their bitcoin. And so I think you were one of the more outspoken, rational people as it relates to this dynamic. And I am curious, kind of your read in the space now that it's been a year and the hype that we saw back at the conference in May and then and following in June, July, August through the summer, that has really taken a turn for the worst. And so I want to hear kind of your pulse check on the strategy, the bitcoin treasury space. But then I also want to get your thoughts on this digital credit idea because it's really, like I said, it's really starting to make the airwaves the past several months and that's really what everyone's talking about. And of course that is the catalyst for, or the, yeah, the catalyst for Michael Saylor being able to acquire more bitcoin on his company's balance sheet.
- [45:20]
A
Sheet.
- [45:21]
D
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- [46:07]
B
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- [46:09]
D
multi institution custody and our highest earn rate.
- [46:13]
A
Okay, so I have a bunch of thoughts on this. I can't remember how I phrased it last time I was on your show. Certainly a lot of these treasury companies did dump a bunch of bitcoin and became forced sellers. I don't necessarily think they were the reason for the bear market because I think there were just a lot of whales who unloaded a lot of supply, maybe marginally that the treasury companies added to that pressure. I think one thing I did say, I'm not sure if it was on your podcast or if it was on other podcasts. Was that, look at the MicroStrategy Premium to NAV. That will be a big indicator of when the bull market ends. And I think that was basically exactly correct. When the premium to NAV dropped to one, that kind of we switched from being in a bull market to a bear market. And I had kind of learned that from the 2021 bull market. The same thing was happening with grayscale. I don't know if you. But GBTC was trading at a premium to nav and that created this arbitrage trade where hedge funds could buy Bitcoin, put it into GBTC and wait six months and then sell it at a premium and then kind of cycle through this. And what that meant was that you had this enormous amount of Bitcoin being bought from the spot market and flowing into GBTC where it couldn't be sold. And that really accelerated the bull market. But eventually that premium to NAV went down to one and then dropped and actually went kind of negative. And that was the exact moment when the bull market ended there. So I was like, the same thing's going to Happen now with MicroStrategy. As soon as that premium comes down to 1, that's going to. Because that's when they can't become marginal buyers anymore. Right. Using the common stock, what was the strategy? He was, okay, let me back up one second. So Michael Saylor has gone through three levels of financial engineering to accumulate bitcoin. Level one was, he was like, I have this pile of cash. What do I do with this pile of cash? It's like a melting ice cube. I've built it up over the last 20 years running an actual cash flow positive business. And he discovers bitcoin and he's like, wow, this is great. This is something that I can maintain the value of Bitcoin. The, the cash flow we've built up and grow it over time. So he took, I think it was like 500 million. He made his first purchase of bitcoin and then eventually he was like, that was. And he was using cash flow to continue to buy bitcoin. Then he had this new insight was, wow, our common stock is trading at a premium because we bought bitcoin. Suddenly I have the ability to tap the common stock. I can sell common stock and buy more bitcoin because the market is giving us this huge. It was the, was really high. At one point, I think it was like two and a half times the nav, which is great, right? It's almost like free money. You can just keep hitting the ATM and selling more common shares and buying bitcoin. But that's really bad for common shareholders. They're getting diluted like crazy. So that strategy can buy more bitcoin. And, and so what happens eventually is that premium comes down to one and you can't do it anymore. As a fiduciary of a company, you can't keep issuing common, common stock to buy bitcoin if that premium to the net asset value drops below 1. So he stopped. He effectively stopped. And then the third level of financial engineering is what he's doing now with preferred shares, especially with Stretch, which is this instrument, which is a money market like instrument. It's not actually a money market, but it kind of appears like a money market where you put your money in and you get an 11.5% dividend, every, sorry, yearly dividend, and you get paid out every month. So that's. This is the next level of financial engineering. My concern is that this is now adding some risk to bitcoin. And the reason I think that is when Michael Saylor sells the common shares of MicroStrategy, which was the second level of financial engineering, when he sells the common shares to buy Bitcoin, that's great for bitcoin, that's more bitcoin accumulated. It's bad for shareholders in MicroStrategy because they're diluted. The next level he's gone to is he is selling preferreds, which have an interest payment. So he's bringing future demand for bitcoin into the present. So that capital that goes into Stretch, he uses to buy bitcoin, but he has to pay interest on it, right? 11.5% per year. How does he pay that? He has to pay it by selling bitcoin eventually. So in the future, at some point in the future, he has to sell bitcoin. So that pushes demand down in the future, demand up in the present, down in the future. That's totally fine. If bitcoin starts to rally and we get into a bull market and the adoption story continues to grow, if the price doubles, he has to sell a fairly small amount of bitcoin to make the interest payments relative to how much he bought bought. But, you know, if that doesn't happen, if bitcoin kind of flatlines, then it's really bad, it starts becoming bad for bitcoin because what he's done is effectively add leverage to the whole system through the preferreds. So I think there is some amount of concern that should be warranted that he is choosing this strategy to, to make A pun, because it's adding leverage to the whole market. Saylor so far has been pretty prudent about financial engineering, but I. I always feel some amount of concern when I see financial engineering, because throughout history, financial engineering way more often than not fails spectacularly. Right. Going all the way back to the 18th century and John Law creating paper money in France and the whole thing blowing up. It's very hard to be controlled and be prudent when you're financial engineering because you have this tendency to stretch and want a little bit more and a little bit more. So I worry that they might get over their skis with what they're doing with Stretch. So far it seems to be managed pretty well, but. But we'll see. I worry that Stretch is very different to sell in common. He's now creating a future obligation to sell Bitcoin. He is buying bitcoin now in the present, but he has a future obligation to sell Bitcoin two to three years down the line.
- [53:16]
C
Yeah, I think that's well said. I think that's the tact we've taken, is that ultimately this is an experiment, so you should just tread cautiously. I think that's my biggest kind of issue with the way it's marketed all the way to Sailor most recently. It's funny you went back to the genesis, because I was thinking about this as well, that I don't think a lot of people that came in, in 24, 25 actually know the genesis of how Michael Sailor strategy started. There was no etf, so there was a need for a vehicle through brokerages, IRAs, different accounts, external, outside the US to get exposure to Bitcoin where you couldn't. But then the ETFs came and then that nav compressed. And so you've had to go further and further out on the risk curve. And that's still fine. Everyone can make their choice. But the way, even to this most recent, because I was like everybody, when Saylor came in, he listened and then he kind of just like goes to the background. But I listened to the recent bitcoin conference talk and that talk is all very predicated on. Most people don't want to stand and hold something for 10 years and suffer the volatility and all the things that actually are the fundamental to understanding, you know, value preservation, the things that we understand here. And it's like you can just buy this thing and it's just slightly changed that even though they. It's kind of like speaking out of both sides of the mouth and that this Isn't this risk free rate, especially for something that's nine months old, Individuals should just tread cautiously with it.
- [54:39]
A
I think one thing that's also important, Michael, to recognize about Stretch is that he has really found product market fit. And what I mean by that is there is a lot of capital out there that's looking for what seems like a risk free yield. There are a lot of people in the retail world who look at Stretch and they're like, wow, this is just like a money market, except it pays like 3 more than 3x what a money market is going to pay. But it's very dangerous in my mind to think like that because Stretch is not a money market. It absolutely is not a money market. Even though it kind of of, you know, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is not a duck. And I worry people are going to get into trouble chasing that because it is, it's, it's very attractive, not just for the yield, but from the tax treatment as well. Right. It's, it's deferred taxes, which means that you're not paying, it's not, it's not even paying you interest, it's paying you principal back. So when you put $100 into stretch and then you get a yearly dividend of like eleven and a half dollars, you're not paying any tax on that. That's pure principle coming back. It's just reducing your basis. Right. Whereas if you get 3% in the money market, you're paying tax on that interest. So there are a lot of things that make Stretch really attractive. And he has found product market fit, demonstrated by the fact that there is, is an enormous amount of capital flowing into Stretch. Right. He has all of these products strike and strife and probably forgetting one. But it really is Stretch which hit product market fit and really has like the flow of retail capital into it like none of the others. And that's really helping him buy a lot of bitcoin in the present. And why you see strategy buying like effectively a billion dollars worth of bitcoin every week. Week, Yeah.
- [56:39]
B
I mean, highlight the cost piece real, real quick though. You said he has found product market fit because the retail investors are pouring their money into Stretch and that is exactly true. It's 80% of the demand. But it is the exact opposite of what most proponents online are saying. They're saying that this, these are institutional products. They point to fixed income markets. Well, preferred equity is different than fixed income. But a lot of these narratives surrounding it concerned me because a lot of the proponents for it will say that well these products need to exist because there's all this trapped capital that needs to allocate to these products. But the data shows that it's the exact opposite. And then the other thing that was the big concern to me as well is once these, these AI videos, these promotional videos started to hit the airwaves online about, you know, specifically around the Stretch product, it started to get a little bit concerning to me in terms of where this is all happening.
- [57:31]
C
Well yeah, and I think that's the perverse part of the product market fit sounds good when you say it right. It generally means you got, you got something good going. But it's. I know you're not saying this but it reminds me of like why speculative or the poly markets of the world have product market fit and gambling has product market fit is because everyone's starved because of I pulled this up, you know, ground beef close to 20% year over year and while stake up close to 20% as well, 70 to 80% up since 2020. It's like everyone is filling the pinch and everyone doesn't necessarily know where to park cash or generate some kind of yield. And where product market fit also gets perverse is that in general stance like especially with financial services and Lindy our, like our business is a great example where we've been around three, four years and eight years. As you get more time in the market, more people use it, you feel product market fit, then other people feel comfortable in using that. So this notion of demand and interest kind of signals like soundness and robustness of the underlying but it's not necessarily they're like conflating the two and that's how you end up with these bubbles you're referencing. And we've seen this before BlockFi, we've seen this with these different platforms where liquidity sources because everyone loves that interest at yield especially when you're getting paid
- [58:48]
A
3, 4, 5% and people lever up on it too Michael which is where you where things blow up. When it feels like it's risk free, people like I'm not just going to buy it, I'm going to lever up on it. And you know, when you bring up like Blockfi and Celsius, I think it's not just those guys but defi. I think Stretch is really sucking a lot of energy out of like the Ethereum Defi world because that was kind of one of the comparative advantages that that world had was like oh look, you can do this kind of yield generation. It's really great. You don't need to go to Defi to do any of that. You don't need Ethereum. You just put it, put your money in Stretch. It's a lot easier. And in a way, it is actually a lot safer because it is. It's a preferred, A preferred debt instrument which is backed by the underlying Bitcoin. So it is even safer than these Defi products which aren't yielding as much. So I think a ton of like, oxygen has been sucked out of that Defi room and it's why you don't hear much about Defi anymore. At least I, you know, my experience. I don't know about you guys. I really don't see that stuff being talked about that much because there are a lot of people, like you say, Michael, who are just like chasing yield. And those people don't need to sit in the Defi world anymore. They can just go to a brokerage account and get 11 and a half percent from stretch.
- [60:09]
C
Yeah, I mean, without going deep in the Defi stuff, I think there's been a component of risk capital. And then now with the proliferation of AI, it's made it insanely cheap to go and infiltrate and kind of like just the amount of hacks that have happened the past couple months, the last maybe piece, at least on my side, where I guess this all like breaks down, is it comes down to education. Because what dawned on me a few months ago was ultimately there's a better product than Stretch and anybody can do it. It's just not marketed, which is parking. If you need some income, you want some type of yield in just Treasuries. Now, not saying I have any dollars in Treasuries, but if that's what you're looking for and whatever your risk profile is and put it in spot Bitcoin. And if you blend that together, you end up with a better upside while still holding and preserving your wealth in the things that we know about Bitcoin and the counterparty risk. But. And you. And so there's different ways that this is phrased like stretch, you know, letting you have 33% of the upside and 100% of the downside. But these aren't rationally explained because nobody's out there articulating it. But there's just a lot better products that are more conducive to a retail investor. And I think this is just a function of time and education because it's a rational play. Once everybody understands the risk and then the value of holding, you know, this Outside money in an outside way. And you always have sovereignty over it. And you can eat it. If you ever need to pay somebody for it, transfer it for gold, you have that optionality. You have no way to do anything with the stretch outside of if you're going to take those monthly dividends.
- [61:40]
A
Yeah, I think, I think with risk, a lot of folks don't understand the risk until one of their legs is blown off, unfortunately. I think that's what we saw in 2022. Right. A lot of people chasing yield or interest on their crypto in places like Celsius and Voyager and Blockfi and Genesis. All of those people now have scars and now they understand what risk means. Hopefully we don't have a blow up with stretch in the same way. I think it's fairly well engineered. But I do always worry about financial engineering. I do hope that there's not a blow up there and that a whole new cohort of people have scars that they have to figure out and worry about into the future and they don't want to touch any of these products again. But yeah, risk is one of those things. It's interesting you talked about education, Michael. I worry that people can. They only get education when they feel the pain. I have had so many experiences trying to educate people. And I remember the 2017 cycle, I was at a company where at the start of the year people started asking me about bitcoin because they saw when I worked at this company, I had a sticker on my monitor which said buy bitcoin. And people started asking me, oh, tell me about bitcoin, how do I buy it? By the end of the year they were all trading shitcoins and on was like, this is all going to blow up, like you're all going to lose all your money. And they just kind of ignored me or laughed at me. And like, you know when it's so hard to convey that feeling of being in the peak of the bull market where everything seems to be working and explain to people like, this is going to blow up and you're going to lose everything. But no one wants to listen. Like education can only go so far. It's the education of pain provides education. And unfortunately people have to go through that before they understand what it means, what risk really means.
- [63:37]
C
It's really well put because it encapsulates a lot of what we're building and also the education because we've gotten slack and we have a lot of listeners that are very long the digital asset trade. And ideally they still like us for Some respect. But there's that feeling that I'll never forget. And I know you were around. I was building at Unchained and it was 22 and blockfi. Just remember the numbers were 7.9% to lend against your bitcoin and on chains were 9.9. And we used to say risk adjusted, you know, is like normally it's much, it's more expensive to go to block or stay at Unchained, but risk adjusted, it's much cheaper because these assets are segregated, they're on chain. You have different institutions participating. But I said that not fully, like, I don't know, in your, in your body, in your brain. You're intellectualizing it, but you don't feel it in your bones because I never seen it. And then when it blew up and then I felt it through my full body. So it's everything we built in this business. So when you see things, I think you're coming to the same kind of like instinctual thing. It's like it's not saying it will, but all the pattern recognition has shown that if you financial engineer in Bitcoin that it just generally ends up with people losing a lot of wealth. And so until proven otherwise, you almost have to take that stance. And that's really where you come from, the education. It's not saying that it will, but everything we've seen hints at you want. It's all about capital preservation in this game.
- [64:54]
A
Totally those, those are the businesses which survive. And I remember speaking with someone at Galaxy who said they were looking at all these other players like Celsius and blockfi and how they were originating a lot more loans and they couldn't compete. They weren't offering an interest rate anywhere near those guys. And they were wondering how are they doing it? And they were losing business to those players. But ultimately Galaxy survived because they had prudent risk management. Right? They weren't offering an interest rate which wasn't sustainable and they weren't originating loans that weren't actually safe and could be paid back back. But all those other players died. And it's in our space. It's the cockroaches that survive and which thrive. The ones who are ready for a nuclear winter and, and are always prudent. And you know, one company I think of that really operates that way is river, which, you know, they, they're so heads down, they're so focused on building the business without risk are. And I, I feel like they're the kind of company which is going to survive a very long Time they're not kind of constantly looking to go over their skis. But yeah, like you say, people don't understand this until, till it really gets them.
- [66:11]
C
I'm actually curious before we leave, what keeps you busy these days and specifically around AI I know you have to be playing around, doing something. I think all the bitcoin side is very curious about this space. So just curious on anything you're playing or tinker around with.
- [66:22]
A
I mean I use AI AI every day constantly. Like any I, I, basically any question that floats into my head, I'm, I'm straight at AI and it's provided actually enormous value to me. Like I remember getting a legal opinion on some tax issue and it cost me a lot of money, like more, more than $10,000. And I got a, I got a memo written and, and then I asked the same question to Gemini and I got a much more detailed, nuanced answer, which is effectively the same answer that I got, mirrored the legal opinion but provided more nuance and I could ask follow up questions and it cost me $20. Like, I mean that's, that's my monthly subscription. I mean I just scratching the surface on how powerful this is. This is really going to transform our lives in ways that we don't even really fully understand yet. It's, it's incredible to be living through a time like this where it is like the industrial revolution times 100. So I'm blown away. My training was in computer science, but specifically in machine learning. And I came to the US in like the early 2000s and you know, was using machine learning, very primitive machine learning compared to what we have today at Google, building models to kind of organize new stories. I just, see, I never thought that we would solve, we would solve the Turing test, that we would pass the Turing test in my lifetime. And to see that having been achieved, I'm blown away. So I'm really, really excited about how this is going to change our lives. And I think if you're not using AI like non stop, you're putting yourself at a huge disadvantage. Any question you have can be solved. Like we live in a renaissance for autodidact. You can learn anything, you can do anything. And there have been situations where I'm like, I can't get this. I was in Australia and I was trying to get a microwave to work. It sounds ridiculous. It was like really weird model where you had to go through a bunch of steps to get it to heat something up. And I just took a photo of it. It asked Gemini and It was like, this is, this is the model. I've looked up the manual. These are the button sequence that you need to press before it'll start working. And so I feel like I have a superpower in everything I do. My instant assumption is I can do anything. I have the world's smartest person by my side and I can ask them any question. So I think, you know, for your listeners, that's the mindset you should have. And if you're not constantly interacting with AI, you're putting yourself at a huge disadvantage each Agreed.
- [69:13]
B
We'll have to see Vijay in the next year or so. We'll have to have you back onto the show and see what happens between now and then. Could be fireworks. Time will tell. Appreciate your time, Vijay. Always great to catch up with you. Where would you like to send people to follow along with the work that you're doing?
- [69:29]
A
You can follow me on x RealVJ. That's where I, you know, talk about bitcoin the most. It's probably the best place to find me as well. I respond to DMs and I like chatting with people about Bitcoin. Coin.
- [69:41]
B
Excellent. Thanks, Vijay.
- [69:42]
A
Thanks guys.
- [69:44]
E
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that On Ramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.