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- [00:00]
Brian
There was this notion from Ben Hurwitz when they started a 16Z, it was this reality that a, they weren't really founder friendly venture capitalists but also they, it was still looked at as a small industry and they, they realized that software was going to quote unquote, eat the world and so they built a firm based on that. And I think that there's a real angle where it's not that AI eats the world, it's AI and bitcoin eats the world. Because you're only going to really get the benefits of AI if you have founders that understand bitcoin and scarcity and then they sweep that capital on a long enough time horizon. Again, that's a little early, but I could see how that on a long enough time horizon ends up as in not like long, like 50 to 100 years, like in the next 10 to 20 TBD, if it's in the next 1012 to 24 months. Because it's still non zero chance that that happens though. And I think that's just a reality where we're going and specifically why it's, it's greater than a non zero chance is because of this event horizon we passed post 2020 with inflation. I think that's the thing that most people just forget is that the money printing, the amount of capital that individuals have disposable income is just reducing at such a high velocity and then they're not making up for it in their wages. That these companies are sophisticated, they know that this is happening and they have to get rid of that bloat and then figure out how to optimize and get better efficiencies. Whether it's via AI or robotics, it
- [01:23]
Liam
all comes down to computers communicating.
- [01:27]
Brian
The information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold.
- [01:37]
Michael
Is it still rat poison?
- [01:38]
Brian
Probably rat poison squared.
- [01:41]
Michael
We need to get into the world of okay.
- [01:43]
Liam
This is actually foundational technology.
- [01:46]
Brian
What the Internet of money does is it creates a single network which can do a micro transaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one
- [01:59]
Michael
of the major forces for reducing the roller gun.
- [02:04]
Brian
The one thing that's missing but that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash.
- [02:13]
Michael
All righty, gentlemen. Welcome back to another episode of Final Settlement. Today is Monday, April 27, 10:37am Eastern Standard Time. Big show, lots to get into. How are we doing boys? Have a good weekend?
- [02:28]
Brian
We're doing good. You know you got a predator out there listening to the pod calling Us suits. I take that as a. You know, if anybody knows me, Brian, former suits. I don't think he's ever, I don't think he's ever seen me in a suit. I, I figured I won in life if I never had to put on a tie. Unfortunately, actually haven't had to really put on a tie, so. Flutter, appreciate you listening, but there's a reason why you like it. There's at least some non suit ask takes on on this podcast and you're, you're, you're hearing it from one of them reformed.
- [02:59]
Michael
Reformed and former suits. Uh, I guess. Michael, you were never technically really a suit. You were, you know, you were in tech doing your thing.
- [03:07]
Brian
Never really the only way reason I got to a collared shirt was I used to take it as a badge of honor. We used to wear these T shirts and Google and, and we work. And then the second we got into quote unquote financial services at Unchained, I realized, oh God, like this industry is so insane. We have to put on a collared shirt because if we're in a T shirt on. Because this was during COVID taking these consultations with individuals with World Capital. We're going to look like kids. So that's where the. I think the suit S comes from. It's like, well, you're playing with real money. You gotta, you know, at least show up a little bit. But which randomly. Just side note, I was explaining this to somebody the other day. I don't know if this is popular or not, but it's the truth. And the truth usually is the right thing to say is the whole genesis about onramp and the green and the tree was just around like the insanity of crypto and bitcoin that you already have this like radically crazy asset underneath. And most crypto bitcoin firms layer radical on top of radical. So anybody listening can go to Kraken's website. God bless them. Probably great team. But you just see this purple and this like high velocity in the app. And it was this realization that if you really want to cross the chasm, you got to look like a traditional financial firm. And that's like, it was just embedded in my mind was like green, old green, hunter green. And then the tree. And the tree was like, well, it's a simple note. It's taking a lot of symbol symbiotic like symbolism with the trees and the branches in. In life and foundation and keys. But it really started as that symbol, that simple basis. And I was sharing this with somebody the other day and they thought it was super fascinating. So anyway, that was kind of like embedded into the caller is if you're going to be dealing in a radical asset class, you got to like, you know, professionalize some area of it or you just kind of everything's floating around.
- [05:01]
Michael
Yeah, you got to feel, feel a little familiar. I remember from my, my Tradfi suit day, like there were thousands of investment management firms, hedge funds, that, you know, they had some sort of tree symbolism embedded into what they were doing. And you know, it does, it does symbolize sort of a long term approach. Generally speaking, trees take a long time to grow big and strong. And that's kind of the idea. But let's get into it. We got, we got, we got a big list, boys. So we're going to start off probably the biggest news of last week. Tether. We're freezing some tether. And we've talked about this past several weeks, you know, as the Iran conflict has sort of pressed on that there were reports that stablecoins or other cryptocurrencies, perhaps even bitcoin, was being used to pay the Hormuz toll. And we talked about the idea that, you know, it probably doesn't make a whole lot of medium to long term sense to be using tether for that type of transaction because us can freeze it. And that's exactly what they did here. They froze 344 million of tether that was linked to the Iranian regime. What do we think, gentlemen? Big deal.
- [06:13]
Brian
I mean, I know it's probably just face value what happened, but I can't help but feel like this is some 3:40 chess with like Bessant coming out there explaining, you know, it's just kind of a weird, I think timeline to be in 26 and having somebody like that, you know, reference just tether and freezing cryptocurrencies for oil is just a pretty insane proposition. I think the biggest thing, which is the obvious one, is that there's just a reality. There's only one asset that can allow you to move value across time and space at the efficiency that is Bitcoin. And so I don't know if this really just shows the value prop of it more than anything, but also just ties into the reality that all these systems being created, they are a little bit more efficient than the existing system, but they're just as fragile and just as centralized. And we're going to talk more about that. But I think that's going to be a key theme here, especially anybody that's just like tangentially related or interested in the space and trying to get their feet wet or tradify is you can build on a lot of these rails, you can probably make a lot of money, but just know that it's a lot of window dressing because at the end of the day, there's a single throat to choke. In all of these cryptocurrencies, there's only one, and even that one is now starting to be discussed as well. Maybe we just need to freeze some coins because we may have some quantum thing. So anyway, that's kind of my initial thoughts. Yeah.
- [07:43]
Michael
The big difference there being that people need to infiltrate the decentralized consensus to be able to even think about doing something like that, where here the treasury just presses a few buttons, makes an announcement, and taps Tether on the shoulder and those coins are frozen. So it's a very different sort of mechanism, obviously. But, yeah, I mean, I think this is a big deal in the sense that this just to your point, really, maybe purposefully, maybe inadvertently, is an advertisement, a commercial for. Why Bitcoin exists is really my takeaway from it. And I also thought it was interesting. Like, he doesn't. We have the bent tweet up here. He just says in cryptocurrency, he doesn't actually name Tether here, which I, I found somewhat interesting in the sense that, you know, I think Tether, if you watch what happen, has happened over the past 12 to 24 months. They've become sort of closer and closer with the US Government, obviously the Lutnik connection, and then, you know, creating a genius compliant version of Tether. So they're, you know, in my mind at least, becoming more and more an effective arm of, of the US regime. And this is a prime example of that.
- [09:02]
Liam
Yeah, I think that we're going to learn the lesson again and again. It's just eternal summer that these assets can be seized. We've seen sophisticated folks like, who want to evade sanctions, like Iran, Ven, or North Korea, Venezuela, the Lazarus Group. Not saying that it's a good thing, just, you know, move to assets that actually cannot be seized, unlike usdt. And that's going to dovetail into some of the other things that we're going to talk about. But there, there really only is one asset with, with no central throat to choke here.
- [09:37]
Michael
Yeah. Not only are these assets more censorable, but just looking more broadly at the crypto digital asset space, these are fragile networks relative to something like Bitcoin. Past several weeks, we've had a number of crypto exploits hacks, KelpDao. I've never heard of kelp dao, but AAVE was a big one. Layer zero. There was an issue. And so this is sort of compounding and I think it relates somewhat to, you know, all the advancements in AI where effectively it's becoming easier and easier for people to find these exploits, find these fragilities in these protocols and exploit them, whether that's through hacks or other means. But Michael, maybe I'll hand this to you because I know you've been, you've been thinking about this a lot.
- [10:35]
Brian
Yeah, I have in a. It came to me when I wanted to bring up. And we haven't had a chance to talk about. I think you're going to have some interesting takes or hearing it from the first time is. So there's. Let's go back to the. The start because this is multi thread and it's going to tie into like quantum and the, the, the bitcoin tether stuff is on the first. The. Just to go back there is like derivatives of eth. I guess it was like R. St Eth. I think it was St. Ether RS Eth. Either way, there's some ETH that was effectively manipulated to create more of this token. And then it went into a decentralized lending pool, which is aave. And then it was able to pull out that Ethereum. I think they got like 200 million out, 70 million got frozen by another protocol, again going back to the decentralization theater. And it's very interesting when you listen to a lot of very smart people that work on the crypto stuff because it's a fascinating dynamic across the board. Like the more I just keep talking every week, it helps work through these ideas and then you build and then you see the market and you have to just remember that. And it makes sense when you hear it, it's like, well, you're just marrying on tradfi. You're marrying on the exact people that are building on it, the same mental models. And so most of the time in Tradify people are very diversified, so that's already there. So very few people that are building on these crypto assets really have large percentages of their wealth in any one of these single tokens, including bitcoin. So that's where they just don't actually think of it as money. But then there's another angle where they can never understand because one of the solutions that are coming up here is you need some entity in the middle, like an aave, to have certain permissions or controls before the collateral is given out. Meaning, okay, you're calling against. Because I think there was like layer zero involved in this and there's all these just different intermediaries and instead of it being blinded where you're going and parking, call it 400,000 in collateral and you're taking the 200,000 of the, of the their cryptocurrency. You have some permissions in place and when you hear that, it kind of makes sense. But the thing that they're forgetting is that these are supposed to be decentralized protocols. So they're effectively. They miss the idea that you start at the money being decentralized and then you work backwards into where you start to park centralization and trust it. Because they keep trying to layer in. They want like the cake and eat it too. They want these things to be decentralized, but then they want to insert controls and governance and it's like no, no, let's just take a step back. You need the money to be decentralized and then you introduce at different layers centralized trusted entities. The one I always think about is like multi institution custody for lending as an example. Because when you think about taking a loan against your Bitcoin, so you have this decentralized asset and you have multiple entities holding those hardware, device or those keys and they have different protocols and permissions to withdraw that collateral. It is the true sense of defi because you don't have a centralized entity holding it, but you also have a centralized entity that's taking the kyc. They are on the hook. They do have licenses because you still need all those things if you're going to go take a $10 million, $100 million loan out. And so when you think about it through that lens, you can start to see that across all these sectors is they don't go back to the money and having that sufficiently decentralized. But, and so the last thing I'll say is when you go back to all the quantum conversations with Anchorage and Coinbase, and I think you're probably, you know, anybody listening is probably going to hear us talk more about this is they gravitate towards, well, how do we like centralize a little bit and make some changes? Because we can versus understanding like they don't, they don't fundamentally grok that you can't centralize or put infringe on on all these assets. You got to pick where you let them run. And that is a big component of Satoshi's coins because they arbitrarily think, oh we can free Satoshi's coins. Oh, arbitrarily. We can seize tethers. Like, we know if it's going on Iran and North Korea, it's like, if it's money, then it has to work for everyone or it works for no one. It's a slippery slope once you start on that. And so of course, tether should always be, you know, not always, but like, it's a centralized entity. They appeal or they have to be governed by from a legal and a licensee perspective. So it makes complete sense. Just like a bank would freeze illicit capital, but they start to conflate all of it and it just means everything's up for grabs and they're effectively just rebuilding the same system. And they don't fundamentally get that.
- [14:59]
Michael
Yeah, I mean, that's at a higher level. That's what's happening.
- [15:03]
Liam
Right.
- [15:03]
Michael
Like the crypto space, I think, was purported to be one thing for the past, call it 10 years. And I think what they're finding is that a lot of that quote unquote, decentralization not only wasn't rooted in any sort of reality, like it was theater, but now that TRADFI is coming in and, you know, to some extent adopting these Rails, they don't give a shit about the theater. They want it to be centralized, it needs to be centralized for all these various reasons. So they're just adapting the Rails and sort of absorbing all the things that you could at least grant some form of utility to in the space. And so I think that that's just a transition we're going through. I do want to zoom out slightly to. This was just a great tweet. And because, you know, Michael, everything you said about decentralization, these Rails is totally spot on. But if we just take a step back and like, this is a great characterization of what actually happened a week or two ago in terms of like the exorbitant forms of leverage and re leverage. So this is what, this is basically what happened. And I'm just going to read this says, look guys, it's actually really straightforward. A bunch of people staked their eth on the Ethereum blockchain to earn yield, except they didn't want their capital to be locked. So they actually staked with a liquid liquid staking protocol called lido, who provided them a liquid staking receipt called steth, except they decided to juice their yield further by depositing their steth receipt tokens into a restaking protocol called eigenlayer, except they didn't want to lock up their capital so they actually restaked with a liquid restaking protocol called KelpDao, who provided them with a liquid restaking receipt called RSeth. That's why you got confused, Michael. There was two. There's two versions of this, except they decided to juice their yield even further by depositing their RSE tokens into a lending protocol called aave so that they could open a leveraged looping position that borrows ETH against RS eth collateral and resticks the ETH into RS eth, which is then deposited as collateral. Except it turns out that RSE used a cross bridge, cross chain bridge called layer zero that was hacked by North Koreans, causing RS ETH to become under collateralized. And now these looping positions are stuck and unprofitable. And so that's why there was all this bad debt. And so basically, this is just like defi what it has been in a nutshell. Like, it's just perpetual leverage machines that eventually blow up and there's bad debt. And then that's why it all ends up being theater at the end of the day, because these protocols have to make a call and say, well, we're just going to either roll back the chain or raise funds to basically buy out this bad debt. And so that's where the defi land is at right now. This is, I think, a perfect sort of encapsulation of what it has been and what it is.
- [17:41]
Liam
I didn't see that. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, I mean, the real problem here is there is just so much velocity across all of this. And so, like, I don't know how many layers of different kinds of ETH there actually are. And none of them actually really have any core proposition back to the core layer. So they're all claims on the underlying that is just driving this out further. And they're not actually decentralized. So all these layer 0 and RS ETH and AAVE now have real problems that they want to choose and how they're going to either socialize the losses or take them on themselves. And these things, despite calling them defi, it's just faster finance arbitrum. They actually froze assets by, I think it was a guard of 11 or 12 people and just call that decentralized. If there are 12 people that make a decision to freeze a coin, it's. It's pretty sad out there for defi right now.
- [18:39]
Brian
Yeah. And it's really interesting because it goes back to conflating and you can kind of see this with the stretch and like, dat stuff. As well around like all of these things, whether people like it or not, are competing with monies. Like you're either competing with money or you're competing as a claim on a productive asset like for an equity. So you're either security or your money and you're competing in one of those fields. And so these are money like assets. And if your monetary properties aren't sound, it's proved out in the market cap. That's why none of these cryptocurrencies even eth. I don't know if it hit its all time high based on the 21 or where it's at compared to it, but I know it's either right below it or hasn't and, and it's because of these properties. But at the same time you have all this capital coming in and it's trying to solve for things that people believe Bitcoin can't do and they lack the kind of vision to understand. If you've solved this one problem well then over time you'll solve the others. The easy one to point at is privacy. When you see like zcash but you're already seeing this with the AI front because in this next wave you're going to see a lot of like the. Because I do think there's value in how do you kind of tie in, compute and effectively pull resources and incentivize resources to be shared and pulled and you'll have this digital bearer token that you will move around but you don't need its own. You're going back to barter. And it's really fascinating. I can't help but think it's like one part just naivety and then the other part just true ignorance because your bags are tied to it where you have. And like the, the good example to call is like the, the Blockworks guys because I like those guys. I mean I think they're super smart but they always go back to like crypto and I don't get it. And like all these problems and they refuse to like just address that. Maybe like crypto really doesn't have or isn't solving anything. I think stablecoins are solving something that's not really crypto and I think everyone already understands that. And then like the other angle is even if you could get a decentralized stable coin, which I honestly think you probably. There's a, there's a, you could potentially get there like what we saw with MakerDAO, you still end up in this problem where the feds and the government, if you get in any kind of scale because you're behind it, you end up in a real precarious spots like MakerDAO happened. And that's why I think the hyper liquid stuff ends up centralized. You already start to see this with like you know, NYSE and other firms starting to get closer to it because the underlying money has to be fundamentally so anyway, I think it's just like a fascinating thing to just continue to see play out and then it starts
- [21:19]
Michael
to conflate where this goes to like
- [21:20]
Brian
early writers and just business building. I think that there's versions where you can understand that bitcoin's money. You can understand stablecoins play a role in efficient movement without putting your clients and customers at risk. Because that's where all these firms I think are missing is that if they play and they open their attack surface, whether it's offering other cryptocurrencies, other wallets that have to support it. So you're opening up more of the attack surface from all these different vectors that are coming to offering these cryptocurrencies that people come in and don't know that they aren't actually valuable. All those things chip away at your credibility long term. And that's what a lot of these firms are doing and they don't know it yet.
- [21:59]
Liam
If the bitcoin price doubled tomorrow, would you feel good about how it's being secured right now? Most people have not really pressure tested that and I get it. I have talked to people who have self custody for over a decade and others who've stayed on exchanges because they could never get comfortable managing their own cash keys. Both camps have real concerns. That is why we built on ramp multi institution custody so no single company can lose it, move it or use it. Lloyd's of London insurance, inheritance planning built in and a team that can walk you through the entire setup. Get started in 15 minutes. Book a free consultation@onrampbitcoin.com on ramp secured by three controlled by me.
- [22:39]
Michael
Yeah Liam, you got anything else there? Or we could move on to the real economy. Outside of fairytale land in crypto defi space, there was some pretty startling data just around layoffs. It's something we've talked about over the past probably six to 12 months, but this was from Kobec letter. White collar employment is sharply declining. The number of the S and P number of s and P500 employees fell by 400,000 in 2025 to 28 million. Posting its first annual decline in over 10 years. And so you know, this decline was Led by ups, Oracle, Amazon, Meta, Intel, a lot of the names that we've heard in the headlines in recent months that are doing pretty massive layoffs. Amazon with 16,000, Meta was 8,000 and Microsoft I think most recently offered voluntary buyouts to over 8,000. And so there's a few different ways we can take this. I think part of it is, part of it can be explained by frankly like over hiring and just a bloat at a lot of these large corporate entities. And then I think the other explanation where most people want to take it is like the AI side and I think it's probably somewhere in the middle of a combination of these things. But what do you guys think?
- [24:04]
Liam
I think it's a little bit more of just over hiring. There was another link that I put in there a little bit later down Brian on the impact of on S and P companies through the productivity of AI through the end of 2025 which is obviously a little bit dated now. There's been a 0.1% increase for 2025s and P500 company earnings. Obviously things have accelerated since then, but it's kind of twofold. One Jack obviously had that great article a few weeks back that teams need to be smaller. There's a ton of middle management at all these firms and folks need to reorg their companies in order to get the most out of things moving forward. And all these big organizations are just primed for bureaucracy rather than actual disruption. Plus just there are so many people that are at these firms we've seen that over time that don't actually really do anything and all these, they're probably like Meta is doing all the tracking internally in order to see who's actually working and I know that'll train some of their AIs but I just can't help but think that as this product starts to continue to get better and better and actually takes away resources from the company and they increasingly spend money on it, they're going to have to cut in other places and there are a lot of unproductive people at these large firms where they over hired.
- [25:29]
Brian
Yeah, this is easily probably the most precarious time to be a large company, specifically a large company, probably any company, but definitely large because from a large like Capex perspective, you know you have to shed. We talked about this for years Amazon has been growing but they stayed flat and they've invested in automation. And then when you look at we're still figuring out token usage but the reality of like Meta as an example, increasing their token usage and making a concerted effort to do that to offset kind of the hours of an individual cutting, but just to throw out some, some stats that tie directly into this. And I'll try to be fast. So a total of 14 companies. Walmart, Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Kroger, Target, Walt Disney, Coca Cola, Dow, Best Buy, Dollar General, Adobe, Congre Brands, I don't know that one Lulu man and Workday. You know what they're all doing? They all got rid of their CEO. They're all switching CEOs $2.1 trillion in combined revenue. Because I think it's really, that is a signal. They're saying this is a new world. We switched the landscape, we've gone to a different planet effectively. When you think about inflation, reduced margins, AI and rethinking the company, let alone just think about D2C and what it means to market to the consumer and ultimately how there's these legacy companies that are still spending on ads. But most people, if you're watching something that you even see an advertisement on tv, you'll pick up your phone. So you're not even getting those actual impressions. It's just a fundamentally different world. And I can't help, I mean I don't know if we really landed this, but there was this notion from Ben Hurwitz when they started a 16Z it was this reality that a, there weren't really founder friendly venture capitalists but also they, it was still looked at as a small industry and they, they realized that software was going to quote unquote, eat the world. And so they built a firm based on that. And I think that there's a real angle where it's not that AI eats the world, it's AI and bitcoin eats the world. Because you're only going to really get the benefits of AI if you have founders that understand bitcoin and scarcity and then they sweep that capital on a long enough time horizon. Again that's a little early, but I could see how that on a longer time horizon ends up as in not like long, like 50 to 100 years, like in the next 10 to 20 TBD if it's in the next 12 to 24 months. Because it's still non zero chance that that happens though. And I think that's just a reality where we're going. And specifically why it's greater than a non 0 chance is because of this event horizon we passed post 2020 with inflation. I think that's the thing that most people just forget is that the money printing the amount of capital that individuals have disposable income is just reducing at such a high velocity and then they're not making up for it in their wages. That these companies are sophisticated, they know that this is happening and they have to get rid of that bloat and then figure out how to optimize and make and get efficiencies, whether it's via AI or robotics.
- [28:41]
Michael
Yeah, that's well said. And then the only other thing I wanted to pull up in this context, which I think speaks to sort of the end of what you just said in terms of people feeling this like, you know, yeah, the stock market's making new all time highs. But then you see something like this. The University of Michigan Current Economic Conditions Index is the lowest it's been in 75 years. And so I think this paints the picture of what you described around like inflation's higher than CPI reports, wages are not keeping up. People are in a pretty precarious spot just trying to pay to live, like pay to pay food on the table and pay their mortgage. And so people's perception of how they're doing, how others are doing is only worsening. And so I think that just speaks to all of this, whether it's the layoffs at these large companies or even just how inflation's impacting the household.
- [29:38]
Brian
Yeah, I was just gonna say it reminds me of the GDP conversation because a lot of these things are just mass phenomenal versus real, where if GDP is growing, but you're also putting like larger and larger percentages into government spending for its own resources, is it really growing? And then it ties back to like some of the Fed speak, but also just some of the reality of whether it's 3, 5, 10%. Are these vehicles giving you dollars on your money really keeping pace with inflation? How do you like actually get ahead? And there's very few assets. I think we would contend that it's bitcoin and gold just mathematically are the things that will protect you from the debasement. And a lot of that gets obfuscated because people don't necessarily feel they see the stock market at all time highs. They see all these like macro backdrops of, and they assume that the situation is as bad as it is, but in reality it's, it's honestly much worse when you look at just like going to the grocery store. Because there was another stat I saw today about somebody was talking about their wealth and it was, it was like $395,000 in equity in their home. Right. So eliquid and then it was like 300,000 in their 401k and then it was like a hundred thousand and something else. And so like they're just like stuck because they have no and they're stuck at their job, they can't move. And so on paper they may have some wealth but none of it is liquid. And so I think that's just like ties into a lot of this masking and still while financial advisors and the large incumbents are pushing the 6040 which again mathematically just doesn't work anymore. And that's why this game is probably a long one because the incentives to educate the market aren't there. Especially when you have people out there developing products that are built on Bitcoin or giving dollars on Bitcoin. It's like, is that really actually solving your problem? And if it's not, then what are we talking about?
- [31:26]
Michael
Yeah. All right, moving on. Little, little digital asset roundup. We've got some interesting stablecoin money movement type headlines. I'm going to cycle through this one quickly first a little bit more noisy than, than what we'll get to, but Kalshi I and crypto expansion with perpetual futures trading we'll sort of compete directly with Binance and Hyper Liquid on that side. Speaks to what we've talked about around like you know these. Whether it's Kalshi Robinhood Coinbase trying to become the everything platform for your do it all casino, whether it's perpetual futures, prediction markets, actual sports gambling, it's all kind of morphing into one. Unless there's any thoughts on that, I think there was some more interesting links in the digital asset roundup. Just.
- [32:13]
Liam
Just one. Yeah. I think that these are really new products and this is the only real meta left in crypto. It seems to be perps and stablecoins and Bitcoin. Other than that, as we discussed, all of Defi is essentially dead. One thing just worth noting is there are going to be people who are sophisticated on the other side of these trades that actually can pinpoint where all the weaknesses with all these products out there and exploit them as they get more and more adoption. I think that they've been successful for so long and people can talk about the different funding rates and, and ways to not get liquidated. But in the end, like what we saw with 1010 last year with those things kind of wicking down in a moment, I think that there are going to be sophisticated folks on the other side of these trades and really hunt out everybody who's using all these crypto perps. So I don't, I kind of think that in the long term this is not going to be something that really gets a ton of traction moving forward. But it's, it's for the short term definitely going to expand a ton of.
- [33:17]
Brian
Yeah, I think that that's one thing to call out with this, that you'll see the large incumbents play in like the perps world. But the defi narrative is something that I was thinking about really is another one of those like fallacies where it was always meant to be democratizing for retail or people with no money. But the reality is like people with no money just need like actual access to dollars if they're outside of the US and stablecoins and then bitcoin to preserve their wealth and then real money doesn't go into defi given all the risks. And so it's just another one of those like retail phenomenons that are kind of masked as the future. In reality they don't really have scalable product market fit because it's going to look more of like tradify. So yeah, that's just something that I think never gets talked about because it's always discussed as democratizing. But the reality is like nobody really wants true decentralized finance with no governance or controls. They want at least some trust in the middle people with real money.
- [34:18]
Liam
We got democratized gambling though.
- [34:21]
Brian
Yeah. And that's the interesting thing. I do see where the Hyper Liquid and Bitmex is when you're on the edges and you're starting where there's a lot of value. But as he starts to get to scale, we saw what happened to Bitmex and so the same thing we talk about here and then Hyper Liquid is eventually the regulatory apparatus is going to wrap its arms around it. Look at Deribit and you know, Coinbase. And so it's just a matter of time if these things have scale. And I do think for whatever reason, my understanding is there are some efficiencies with like perks versus options trading. You'll just have them come into that and maybe you get again some efficiencies and you get also probably greater losses because of the velocity. But they're going to end up governed and sanctioned by, you know, actual like different licensing bodies.
- [35:08]
Liam
Check out earlyriders.com for all the latest in bitcoin investment research. Now back to the show.
- [35:16]
Michael
Yeah, well said. All right, Michael, your boy Peter Thiel, his company that he backed Ramp is rolling out zero dollar conversions between tether and dollars across their product suite. Ramp historically sort of a more of a fintech player, not a crypto native company necessarily but is rolling out valued at 32 billion. I didn't realize that rolling out support for Ethereum Solana Plasma issued USDT tokens across its entire product suite. What do you got here, Mike?
- [35:51]
Brian
Yeah, I mean I think this is easily one of the bigger use cases. There was another some news that DoorDash was partnering with Tempo on the Stripe side with stablecoins to pay out the clients. And then also it just came out that they're starting to test on the Western Union front that I think that we forget that there are a lot of efficiencies with being able to stream your salary for a lot of people that live day to day, week to week. And so if you imagine if you're an Uber driver or you're a doordash delivery driver or you're at Ramp and you work at a certain firm and you want to actually stream that payroll to your end user or your end employee on a week basis and that's just one easy example. But I just think that these digital first technology first Ramp, one of the hottest kind of like fintechs are going to find those efficiencies. That's, that's not even accounting for Ramp's businesses business. So those businesses will naturally have multinational kind of constructs where they have to have payments whether it's vendors we've always known like SpaceX is a great or not SpaceX but well SpaceX because it's Starlink is a big example because Starlink is global and so how do you actually pay out people that are on the ground selling the product, servicing the product, using the product if you need to pay for it and you sit in a country that maybe isn't dollar denominated. So I think it makes complete sense and we'll see a lot more come about it even loans and other products that are sitting with between the dollars on Stable coins.
- [37:28]
Liam
Yeah, I don't have much to add there too except for dollar denominated stablecoin rewards and credit cards too in the future will definitely be big too.
- [37:38]
Brian
Yeah and I think this is like empirically shown when you look at a lot of the. I know a 16Z had a chart we'll put in the show notes. It was like eight tight charts on stablecoin growth and the big one is really if anybody's ever tried to issue a card it's an insane. It used to be an insane kind of like endeavor when it came to the amount of capital requirements and time it took to get like a primary issuer, the bank in between all of that in reality now you can issue these stable coins, give them to somebody in their wallet however it's serviced and then give a card that you can spend on that at any merchant globally that just like disintermediates a lot of these legacy processes. And these are just some of the first order things we know about. And so I do think that there's going to be a lot of value. But again it's kind of like that conflating innovation or solution with just greater optimization because they can both be true in that they're optimizing workflows but they're still not actually servicing as the underlying problem which is dollars are not keeping pace with inflation. So there's two things happening and I think they just get conflated together and that's where maybe people also throw the baby out with the bathwater thinking like stable coins are just crypto. It's like reality, it's part of the market structure and forces around technological innovation but also from a fed and an administration perspective is like nobody's buying our debt, they're selling it at record paces and they need somebody for the short term debt. And this is where stable coins are were meant and are going to play a role for the demand.
- [39:18]
Michael
100% yeah this was the A16Z report which put together a number of of charts. I thought this one was the most interesting actually of the of this report that stablecoins are being used increasingly for intra country payments as opposed to cross border which I think historically has been the narrative around stable coins and and sort of digital asset money movement is going cross border. But I think you know the doordash example being a good one like these things are being integrated more into just like everyday commerce which which makes sense and sort of would support what you're seeing on the chart here is like businesses consumers are going to be using these things as opposed to just people that need to remit dollars cross border. Liam, anything on that stuff?
- [40:07]
Liam
No.
- [40:08]
Michael
All righty. We're going to India boys. The E rupee through welfare pilots their BRICS digital currency plan takes shape. Farmers and food programs anchor 10 pilots aimed at boosting usage while New Delhi eyes BRICS CBDC link ahead of their 2026 summit. And so it says here India is routing portions of its roughly 80 billion dollar welfare system through the E rupee in about 10 pilot programs. I think we're going to see more of this, you know, we talk a lot about stablecoins and their interesting use cases. There are some, some slippery slopes in terms of how this can be turned into more of a true CBDC like instrument. What do you guys think?
- [40:53]
Brian
Yeah, I think this is fascinating trend to watch play out and also something that you start to just see nothing new under the sun in that in other countries where regardless if it's the democratic process or what is okay or tolerable, where these are effectively CBDC is they're not even really master stablecoins. And then in the west we naturally have to put a little bit of more of the private, public private partnership where you have the usdcs and other so they, they have an arm's length from the, from the government in the same way like Meta and the social networks do. But then we saw during COVID how close they were linked when it came to censorship and all the things associated. These aren't even conspiracies. This is just the truth. And so yeah, there's multiple things. It's a confluence of like stablecoin narrative growing and they're going to provide these efficiencies but in the same way they don't solve for inflation, they still don't solve from censorship resistant and the ability. And basically if somebody doesn't like who you are, what you do, those dollars aren't yours and they can effectively be frozen. So it's unfortunate because there's going to be a lot of pain in learning that. And then also I think all governments understand that the structure in the way that their liabilities are set up and where we're going into this inflationary world, especially with everything that's happening in Iran and will continue to happen in the markets, that the math isn't going to work and people are going to need bailouts, they're going to need this like velocity of capital to be able to be inserted into their wallet. We saw a little bit of this at Covet start to get test out. I think Cash app was accepting some of the stimmy payments through Cash app so you can take delivery. And then we reported on this I think like six months ago where in New York City they did a little bit with USDC for some of the lower income brackets. And so I think we're just going to see more and more of this because you have to quell the kind of tempers of the masses when food costs too much and they're not making ends meet. And so yeah, I think this, this kind of is in line with what I think we would would expect to see across the world.
- [43:09]
Liam
Agreed. Yeah, we'll probably see this in the US too. And airdrops when you know they're higher inflation, food costs and would imagine that all these stable coins are talking to the governments on at least a daily or weekly basis too.
- [43:24]
Michael
Where is my USAT airdrop? Waiting on that show. Another story at India. I thought this was kind of interesting. Fetty, the bitcoin focused protocol that works sort of on ecash charming mint type deal. They're basically you can now integrate effectively Lightning Payments into India's UPI merchant network which my understanding is basically like it's a digital payments network that allows people to you know, scan a QR code at a merchant and pay with I think the eruby that we just referenced. But basically there's now an app or sort of an API that allows you to basically just use Lightning Payments in that same way where you'd scan a QR be able to pay from a bitcoin wallet. So I thought that was pretty interesting. Not sure how much adoption of this there will be. I don't know how many people in India are really storing their value in bitcoin necessarily. But an interesting, an interesting development nevertheless. Any thoughts on this one, guys?
- [44:32]
Brian
Yeah, I do think this is interesting in the sense of we're seeing more across the world whether it's tether and some of the different layers they have invested in. And then also what lightspark's doing where you're able to integrate into traditional Rails and kind of seamlessly go from like satoshis via lightning into dollars. I think it's positive from a freedom and sovereignty perspective because these are still like permission networks and the, the mint and still. But it still gives you that like gets further out on the edges and gets people more comfortable. And those satoshis are theoretically while they're volatile at all at lower amounts or not, you know, it's not as material but I think helps and that's interesting that they were able to credit to their business development how they were able to get embedded into there to accept it. But to your point, I think it's just the thing that I'm always like looking at is how the order of operations and and are people using things for payments versus store of value and it feels like they really I was thinking about you have to have some lower cost basis and probably significantly lower cost basis for your bitcoin to want to spend it because it's not a real strong use case to like get the bitcoin just to spend it because it's less, it's more censorship resistant because that's not how people think. They just will use whatever the Indian government gives them for free. But obviously as the narrative grows, if these rails stay open and you're taking that CBDC and you can convert it into satoshis and theoretically interoperate where you can still move for dollars, that's interesting. Use cases. So I think these parallel worlds are being built together and it'll just be interesting to see how they converge.
- [46:10]
Liam
Yeah, it's great because India has traditionally been pretty antagonistic towards Bitcoin as well. So it's great to see kind of solutions on the edges. But yeah, to your point, I don't know how much people are actually spending bitcoin or stable coins on lightning too. I'm curious to see whenever Cash app has their new earnings call how much that is taken up because after their initial announcement and push there, I just haven't seen much either in terms of merchants or any data about how many people are actually spending their bitcoin at all those terminals too. I think it's just still a little bit too early and the market needs more education.
- [46:49]
Michael
Yeah, that's a good point. That'll be interesting to see what data they can provide there and that'll be a good sort of source to kind of track that going forward. Um, let's shift a little bit to some public private market stuff. This was a headline from last week. Google's going to invest 40 billion in anthropic. And I think this speaks to what we've discussed in the past and I think was kind of a hot topic maybe like six months ago and then it kind of like went away. But I think this deal is kind of bringing it back in terms of the sort of incestuous nature of AI spend. The investment that is basically going back and forth between these companies. So Google's going to invest 40 billion. They've already had a long standing partnership between the two companies and so it's kind of this self fulfilling flywheel of investing in each other. And Anthropic is now at this insane valuation over a trillion and kind of just ramping up and continuing to raise more and more money because they need to spend more and more on infrastructure and data centers. And this is kind of just the way that sort of at least the very concentrated sort of MAV Mag 7 is, has to be focused on right to, right now to basically perpetuate these all time highs, perpetuate basically everything that's happening in equity markets right now is tied to a lot of this spend and like I said it is seemingly more and more incestuous in terms of just sort of deals going back and forth. What do you guys make of this?
- [48:29]
Brian
Yeah, I, I, I called this one out just because I thought it was interesting that the size I think Amazon also invested five to $10 billion and had a similar like flywheel into some of the like AWS spend from Anthropic. There was also news from last week with Cursor and potentially being acquired. I think it's still pending SpaceX going public or whatever the, the entity that they're wrapping up a bunch of different firms in the thing I'm paying attention to most and I think it's not perfect analogy but it's what we saw with SoftBank when they were allocating so much capital to the door dashes and we works and Ubers of the world and how a lot of that was subsidized for the user. The user maybe benefited some economically, but it was mainly from their pocketbook. It really wasn't businesses built on top of it. Where I think here there's real opportunity for whoever's building with these subsidies. I think you have to be careful because the subsidies won't always be there. And so tokens theoretically while they should go down, they probably go up because not only are people spending more, but they may cost more as the models get better. But at the same time you have these open source models so if you can get the subsidy as a business you can build on this new kind of infrastructure meaning more efficiencies, greater optimization, just doing more that you could have never done before and then you can migrate if they do rug because that's my concern is Anthropic once they get you needed like once they. How many people have you seen on Twitter just even internally where like Anthropic's down, I was like oh I don't or like Claude's down. It's like oh I, you know, don't know what to do. It's like well you got to use your brain. But I think that like last week Deepsea came out with some pretty interesting new open source tooling I haven't downloaded yet. But I do think like basically startups and individuals that are able able to leverage the subsidies, build products and services and then figure out their migration path could actually reap huge rewards and have be huge opportunities to invest in because I don't think we've ever seen anything like this in the market where you can just do so much more with less and so. But yeah, on the the higher level idea of them investing and how this ever gets returned, I think it goes back to this. These are just going to become public utilities and when people need exposure just like electricity or water and when the consumer needs access to it, they're going to leverage their digital CBDC that the government's giving them to pay for it.
- [50:59]
Liam
Agreed. All these companies are so compute constrained and the costs are obviously coming down but it's seeming like all these open source models that are coming out now are so easy to be run on a local computer and the future probably is just having anthropic models or whatever type of frontier model you like, supervising all the other agents and keeping them on track in order to minimize costs because I don't know how they keep on subsidizing it at these levels and how these, they really make these investments tenable from a perspective long term because unless they branch out to subsequent applications, I mean these are some of the smartest guys in the world. I'm not doubting that. But I don't know how the frontier models continue to just accrue value longer term.
- [51:53]
Michael
Yeah, those are all great points. One thing I did want to bring up, I thought that this was pretty interesting from last week. So AngelList announced what they call USVC. AngelList exists to empower the innovation economy. And basically the idea is, what we've talked about somewhat is like all these private companies are staying private longer. The want or the desire at least to sort of democratize access to private companies. So this is an attempt to do that. So you know it says today we're opening for retail access. It's a regulated fund that holds stakes in promising private companies no accreditation requirements and anyone can get started with as little as 500 bucks. Earlier early portfolio companies include Xai, Anthropic, OpenAI, Sierra Vercel, Ruso Lagora and you can see right here this is community noted and we'll go to why here. This is sort of a takedown of what is being said here and I'll just read some of this. So everyone on here is hyping USBC like it's the second coming of VC access for retail. The pitch, 1% fee, 0% carry, $500 minimum. Get into OpenAI before it's obvious. The reality from the actual prospectus is the gross expense ratio is 3.6:1. The no carry is COPE. It's a funded fund. So the underlying VC fund still charged 2 and 20 and you pay it. They just bury under it under acquired fund fees before it's obvious is kind of a joke. The portfolio is these companies that are already very obvious. Your Uber driver knows them. 44% of the fund is already deployed, so the rest sits in cash, charging you fees, liquidity. There's no public listing, so it might be difficult to get out of these things. And so this was just pitched as something that is needed and virtuous and democratizing, when in reality it's pretty exploitative in terms of the fees and the actual access is not all that unobvious. I would say people want to get exposure to these companies. There's not great ways to do it now, but this certainly doesn't seem like a good way to do it.
- [54:06]
Brian
Yeah, I mean, this is a natural, obvious shill for what we launched last week in on Ramp Finance because there's this reality and it goes back to maybe the theme of this is, you know, nothing new under the sun, that everyone's kind of a scammer in the sense that everyone's trying to get further and further out to retail's pocketbooks because these valuations are just getting so insane. And so you have to open up the aperture for investment. And there's very few companies that are really not only principled, but just like going and taking a longer route in the sense of, well, what are the things that are actually guaranteed to provide you a positive capital return and real and nominal returns without putting you out on the risk curve. And again, it's really, it's not that it's rocket science or this isn't true. It's that because you. It's very hard for these firms to make money in gold or Bitcoin as an example because all you can do is maybe get trading fees. And most people don't look at Bitcoin as a long term, like store value for a large percentage of wealth. So people put cryptocurrencies right next to that. Definitely don't put gold and how to do that best in class. So, yeah, I think we're just going to see more and more of this. And unfortunately, everyone's looking for the lottery ticket. So they hear the, the. Yeah, that's crazy. 500 minimum to get in
- [55:22]
Michael
maybe.
- [55:23]
Liam
God, I think maybe just need some way to get out of their venture capital and private equity funds that they're holding for longer and longer because funds aren't going public. So, yeah, sad to see. Yeah.
- [55:36]
Michael
All right, we're somewhat up on time, you guys. Got anything else you wanted to cover, Michael? Do you want to talk quantum forks or Satoshi documentary?
- [55:45]
Brian
I'll do it real quick. And then if you guys want to do the documentary so I can jump to this call, I think it's worth anybody that's interested in the. The quantum narrative worth listening to. The Empire pod, they had individuals from Coinbase, I don't know the exact title. It was somebody from a leadership side of Coinbase and then the Project 11 guys. And I think it's really worth listening to because you can hear the level of confidence that of course we need to freeze Satoshi's coins. And there's so many fallacies built in. One of the main ones is that like a. If we ever got to the quantum, like if they were all pre supposing, like this quantum thing will happen no matter what. So that's the first one. And then the next one is that we have to do something because it's existential for bitcoin. If anybody ever got access to the million coins, which are both not true, but the other one that nobody talks about is like, well, I think anybody with credibility would say this is at least call it 3 to 10 to 30 to never happening. So it's in the future. And most people that would talk about this would say Bitcoin 2, 3, 5, 10 years is bullish on it, whether it's 200,000 or $2 million. So you get to this level and it doesn't even make sense that somebody would dump the coins in that. So then it's just another leap. But then all of them come back to we have to do something and we have to freeze these coins, which is effectively theft. And so I think it's just worth listening because this is only going to pick up steam. And I think we're hearing it more from a lot of thought leaders in the space, whether it's bitcoin, crypto or. There was, I think we talked about on last week's pod and there was a clip that came out from the op Next event where it was like Anchorage, Coinbase and some other firms all, you know, basically saying, look, we're the big boys are here, we need to do something. I think this is just something to keep eyes on because independent of how you feel of the relevance, there's a true reality that by giving up your assets to centralized entities, whether it's Coinbase or microstrategies, micro strategy as an example, those economic nodes may not be voting in your best, in the best sense, with either good intentions or the right intentions. Like, they may have the. They may have the right intentions, but they not. May not understand a second of their effects. And you may have no governance tied to that. So you just may end up with no Bitcoin or the wrong Bitcoin. And it's something that I don't think is. It's going to be. I was feeling this like Q3, Q4 last year, but now, almost a year later, it's all starting to come to light and people are talking about it with such high degrees of confidence. That kind of spooks me because we're still so early in this and they're already concluding, based on a lot of this evidence that's come out, that a lot of thought, you know, smart people on the quantum side say that this isn't even close to happening, but they're just saying they're just like bypassing any of the notes that have come out and said, yeah, this is definitely happening now. We need to do something which is a little bit dangerous.
- [58:44]
Michael
Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy in the context of like, if you think about the prospect of freezing coins for any other reason, we would be totally against it. Like, if North Korea, which has happened, you know, hacks an exchange and takes a bunch of bitcoin, no one's calling for those coins to be frozen. Now in defi land and these other crypto protocols, yeah, that might be the case because they care less about property rights and actual decentralization. But for whatever reason, in this scenario, this hypothetical quantum attack, we're perfectly okay, like stealing or, you know. Yeah, stealing Satoshi's coins to some extent, just to protect from like a marginal dump. Like, you know, Suji has a little over a million coins. Like, that's how much coins were sold over the past, like 12 months from long term holders. So it's not like it's not even existential in my mind. And to Michael's earlier point, like, maybe the attacker isn't even dumping the bitcoin. And even if they wanted to, it'd probably be pretty difficult to do it on like regulated exchanges. So it'd be probably drawn out over time and not this one, you know, market sell of a million bitcoin, like, that's just. That is impossible. Like you wouldn't be able to do that. So, yeah, a lot of fallacies built in. I haven't checked out this pod that Mike shared, but I will this week.
- [60:07]
Liam
There's one thing that they talked about which is like, the big boys are here and you know, we have a lot of institutional investors and so there is naturally those economic nodes can make the decisions on behalf of the network. And that's essentially the same. And they're talking about upgrades rather than forks and any other language out there that is kind of double speak. But this is kind of exactly what happened in 2017 with the block size wars. Great book, but I think it's Jonathan Bear. If anybody hasn't read it and wants to understand more of what was happening at the time, social consensus, what really drove the decisions and how ultimately a lot of the exchanges, miners and folks who were more institutional actors in the space were looking more towards working towards bcash. But ultimately bitcoin won. And why so highly recommend that as these conversations pick up, as more folks want to understand the history of bitcoin. But yeah, I think that the conversation's only going to get more and more active.
- [61:06]
Michael
Yeah, good call out on that book. Fantastic read, Highly recommended. If people haven't read it. And that's the other thing I would say it is more similar to that episode than people want to admit. You have people trying to say, oh, the economic actors are so much larger this time around. Yeah. In terms of overall magnitude, yes. But that's also because bitcoin is bigger in terms of their share of the network. It's not like that different like ETFs plus MSTR plus Coinbase have like, I don't know, 2 million ish Bitcoin. The vast majority of bitcoin still sits with individuals, most of it in cold storage.
- [61:49]
Liam
100%. And back then you had the Bitmains of the world that had a ton and all these other big players too. Yeah, I need to reread that. And you're reminding me too. But yeah, 100%. All right.
- [62:04]
Michael
Thank you, sir.
- [62:05]
Liam
Good rip.
- [62:06]
Michael
Awesome.
- [62:07]
Liam
Thanks, Brian. Appreciate it.
- [62:10]
Michael
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 Onramp 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.