Loading summary
Transcript110 lines
- [00:01]
Liam
If we are in a bear market for bitcoin, like no other bear market in Bitcoin's history had these types of headlines on a weekly basis. Whether it's tradfi, fintechs, incumbents that are getting into the space, whether it's these large IPOs, it's a completely different operating environment from a capital markets perspective. And just in terms of like the interest and the perception of this industry I think has totally changed. And you know, know, while that's still not necessarily being reflected in price and you could say we're in a bear market, it's a very different bear market than any other historical bear market in that sense. Because in past bear markets, literally no one cares.
- [00:41]
BJ
It all comes down to computers communicating.
- [00:45]
Michael
The information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold.
- [00:54]
Liam
Is it still rat poison?
- [00:56]
Michael
Probably rat poison squared.
- [00:58]
Liam
We need to get into the world of.
- [01:00]
BJ
Okay, this is actually foundational technology.
- [01:03]
Michael
What the Internet of money does is it creates a single network which can
- [01:08]
BJ
do a micro transaction to a giga transaction.
- [01:15]
Michael
The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the roll of government. The one thing that's missing but that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash.
- [01:30]
Liam
All righty, gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Final Settlement. It's been a couple weeks. Today is Monday, June 1, 10:39am Eastern Standard Time. Gentlemen, how are we doing?
- [01:44]
Michael
It has been a weird couple of weeks. I don't know what was going on. I think it was Memorial Day. We skipped and then I missed a few last trades and last week I was back with. Who do we have on last week? Yeah, we had vj, which was a timely pod because we talked a lot about the, the DAT stuff and then you were out.
- [02:05]
Liam
So. Yeah, it's good.
- [02:06]
Michael
Good to, good to be back and see what, you know, the market doesn't really like us being back, but we're here.
- [02:13]
Liam
We'll be here. Yes, we will. All right, we've got a big list today, so let's get into it. We don't have to spend a lot of time on this, frankly, but because it's all over the timeline this morning, of course we're going to mention that MSTR has sold some bitcoin. I guess it went through last week and then they announced it this morning or disclosed it this morning. A very small sale. 32 Bitcoin, two and a half million dollars. Now this has been forecasted, this has been expected and I'm not saying like you know, raise the alarm, everything's about to break. But what I said a few weeks ago I think stands and that I think this is a narrative and perception thing that could be a concern. And you already see it in, you know, I think the Stock was down 8 or 9%, recovered a little bit Bitcoin sound. I don't think bitcoin being down is necessarily a full result of, of this but I think it's the perception of you know, this guy who said never sell your bitcoin, sell a kidney before you sell bitcoin seems like he's out of kidneys. And it's not even because the response is well there's tax advantages, they're inoculating the market. All of these things around rationalization of why this makes sense and it's accretive and all these things. But I just come back to something in the calculus of the financial engineering machine that is MSTR clearly changed over the past six months to the point where it was we're never selling any bitcoin and now we're going to sell some bitcoin and we're going to inoculate the market because we might need to sell more in the future. The priority is stretch. This is our most important product and if we need to pay those dividends we might need to sell some bitcoin. So there's a few other headlines that we'll go to that are also around other firms selling bitcoin. But initial thoughts on this Guys, I
- [04:08]
BJ
think this is a little bit of a non story story. They have tax loss harvesting but just over a long period of time. We know that the total interests of the management not trying to blow up their business, the MSTR shareholders which just want a levered trade to get more bitcoin and the interests of Strike and some of their other, some of their other vehicles out there that are preferred can likely not all just continue to be completely in sync. And they're going to have to be trade offs that upset some people. And whether that means selling bitcoin or deprioritizing the preferred and whatever yield they get there, somebody is going to end up in tears here. But I think that this, it just kind of goes into the sentiment is kind of at all time lows. People have been talking about this that it's been you know, lower than the bear markets of the past just because there's not one clear negative thing that people can blame on what's going on like ftx, AI stocks are ripping. I mean just Personal anecdotes have friends that are in other industries that have been dcaing into bitcoin every week and they're like, fuck, why don't I, why am I even doing this? I should just be going into AI stocks or like doubling over the past week. Like other friends texting me this morning like oh, sailors selling now like everybody's market's going to die. Like there's just so much education and, and sentiments just pretty low at the moment.
- [05:40]
Michael
Yeah, man. I mean there's just so much here.
- [05:43]
BJ
It's not like.
- [05:46]
Michael
I think the, the pod again with Vijay was good because we talked about how did we get here with this construct because I think that's something we forget about just the, whether it's MSTR or the DAT construct of like why it should exist. And I think there's a big component to this that we really forget of. How much retail wants exposure to digital assets bitcoin, but is afraid of the underlying. And the proof is in the pudding when it comes down to the ETFs that launched, right? We all feel we never got the friends and family reaching out to us, but you still had the best ETF launch in history because there was a bunch of pent up demand from retail. So when you have these products that are amplified better, the stories and narratives matter a lot. You see the flows. And that was something Vijay talked a lot about is like, you know, product market fit with stretch. It's like, of course there's product market fit. When you go back to somebody that's, you know, starved for yield because of debasement. Well, yes, you get product market fit. It's in the same way Poly market does. Product market fit doesn't mean that it's a net positive or it's going to end up not in tears. And so you end up in this world where retail continues to chase, you know, throw good money after bad because make no mistake about it, it's literally cope. Every time he does something different, the industry just makes up the reason why it's okay, it's changed like three to five times and where it started and the one that, you know, you shouldn't really say don't sell your bitcoin or sell your bitcoin for your kidneys unless you mean it because when you sell it now, you just look like a charlatan. And so you end up in this spot. People will justify it. They'll make up all the things. The funny part is like when I see this, I don't think anything I Truly deep down in my soul do not think anything because like, of course they have to sell it. This construct will not exist in perpetuity. Anybody that talks about them as Medici central banks, all that has never built or done anything in their life. Because just because he gets a bunch of bitcoin does not mean that he can do anything with it. That he can actually allocate, build and do real things with that underlying. Especially in a new world where AI is prevalent and people are going to come and eat your lunch no matter what, try to business, you try to build. So yeah, like of course they have to sell. I mean, my only thing is I just hope we don't. We're not, we're not right? But we don't make money because in a world where he keeps selling and the price is reflexive to the downside, we may all just be sitting at McDonald's working there. And Saylor, then. That's the thing I think most people forget. It's like what goes up comes down. So if he is that bidder in the market, which I don't think he's the sole bidder, but if he's a large, obviously large component to or large holdings and he decides to sell and you end up in this downward spiral, you know, look out below.
- [08:28]
Liam
Yeah, the only other thing I'll say on this is like, I think one of the COPE strategies was like, you know, we're testing the market because we want S and P inclusion and you know, Standard and Poor's doesn't. They don't know if he can sell bitcoin without, you know, cratering the market. It's like, okay, well even if you follow that logic, like selling 32 bitcoin doesn't prove anything. Like what if he sold a billion dollars? Then that would maybe prove that he won't destroy the market. But selling 32 Bitcoin doesn't really prove anything in that respect. But just a few of the other headlines that I mentioned, Pomps treasury company Pro Cap Financial sold some bitcoin to buy back their stock, which is at a 50% discount to NAV. They recently sort of pivoted to AI. Anyway, they bought his own, a high company and then Sequins fully has abandoned their bitcoin treasury strategy, redeemed their convertible debt and they're now a pure play Internet of things semiconductor growth company. And then the other one from the week we were off, I believe Trump Media is selling bitcoin allegedly as their losses are around 500 million. So we don't have to talk much more about the dats. But that's, that's state of the dats for you.
- [09:55]
Michael
Yeah, I, I, when we talk about this, I just can't help but feel like we're taking crazy pills because there's still folks out there. I mean I don't think they listen anymore but believe that these things have value or maybe, you know, TBD if they come back as the market reprices. But still the notion of these firms having fundamental value, you've seen they shift with the narrative program's a great example. As the bull market was taking off, they were doing their thing and then they've naturally turned into AI and whatever else they're doing, they're selling the bitcoin. But if you go listen to a lot of these firms and how they speak about the asset class, they contradict themselves continuously when you think about, they talk about this asset class for trap liquidity pools while they focus on retail or they reference custody being figured out while they have to go and vet five different custodians. Because the only reason you use five is because you don't know where the risk lies. You can just go all the way down. And the sad part is they speak really, you know, eloquently, confidently, whatever. And so you get people that are starved for yield and bitcoin just feels a little scary to hold in size, you know, in a spot construct. And so you end up going on these things. And the crazy part, I guess where the, the crazy pills I'm referencing is that there's very few people that are up on these assets. Like Micro Strategy has the largest base because they've been around the longest. They had that like immaculate conception was a lot of people that bought through their like wife's brokerage or their, their, their 401k retirement accounts. And so you have a lot of people, but even those individuals are like I would never buy or I'm selling because they already have their built in gain versus everyone that's bought the top on strategy or these other assets. So they're sitting to 90% lows. And it's also kind of like per perverse because I think a lot of the individuals that are running these DATs, they have to be careful because they will be sued. And then on the other side of it they have to continue the charade because they have a bunch of bag holders that are, that are holding these things underwater. And that's where you see them all. Just hang out on Twitter because the only reason they're on Twitter is. Because that's where all the retail market is. And so they're just like constantly going back and forth, gassing each other up to. And then like the, the MSTR is like in the E. The mother of all, you know, all coins is like the MSTR is the mother of all dads. Like so you have to like praise Sailor and everything he does because everything you do is predicated on their success. So I don't know how people fell for this. And we've been saying it even before it got coldly. Some people were calling out this past couple weeks, but this has always been the case. Like you can't make money. Money doesn't grow on trees. And this whole idea that you can just park a bunch of bitcoin in an LLC or a C corp, whatever and then it just is going to turn into more bitcoin and it should be worth more in the value. Like it's just never made any sense. Especially once you have the ETFs.
- [12:49]
Liam
A lot 100. Well said. We can move on. I think the other probably biggest story of the past couple days was this clip of Jamie Dimon lashing out about the Clarity act and really against Coinbase and Brian Armstrong. So maybe we'll just, we'll play this clip here. Why does he say stablecoin singular? It's very strange.
- [13:13]
Michael
It's amazing clip. I had not seen it. I'm glad I got to see it live.
- [13:18]
Liam
Yeah, there's a lot there. You, you, you take it.
- [13:21]
Michael
So the first part is, you know, there's like. I think this one's legitimate unless they're really good actors. Because I do think there's a lot of infighting you see within political parties and they basically are posturing. You see this a lot, you know, like even in. They get snapshots of like Obama and who was it like Bush or just a lot of things that you would see that aren't naturally friendly. I think this one is real. But then the thing so some of like the inside baseball that's been revealed to me and it's super fascinating, it makes sense and it's obvious once you hear it is that there's like just general all out war for financial rails and I don't really know where everyone sits. It's really hard to discern because we talked about the new admin, the need for stable coins for really the treasury issuance on the short end, especially outside the U.S. so there's that. But then you see the ETFs, you see Bitcoin and kind of SBR whatever's going on there. The thing that was really a blind spot for me was that all these banks are setting up their own tokenized deposit effectively like closed loop systems, very similar to stablecoins. So you have the stable coins that are issuing, turning on, off and then you have the, you know, some kind of swap that has to take place if you're gonna go from USDC to USDT or whatever else. But in the same way if a regional bank sets up their tokenized deposit infrastructure, it sounds really nice. And all that really is is a deposit that's FDIC insured, that's you know, obviously backed or like re lent out, you know, whatever the banks ratio is. But it gets like those programmatic rails where you can move it. The problem is that if you're a client of X bank in California and you want to send it to Y bank in Chicago, unless they have those tokenized deposit systems set up in the same way usdc, they can't receive it. And so Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan are out there, I think it's like Onyx or whatever, they're working on their own closed loop system and it all ends up around liquidity. So their game is how do we disintermediate and centralize more financial rails and movement. Because as they turn that on then they can go out to other banks and other banks they custody assets for and they can get it to turn it on and it just naturally forms so they end up actually in a higher leverage spot. But then you have other banks that are working on building their own closed loop like consortium networks. And then you have the stablecoin issuance that are doing their own thing. And so, and the funny part, when you go into these rooms and you talk to me like, you know, because these guys are so far away from bitcoin, it really does hurt. But you say, you know what fixes all this? Bitcoin. They kind of laugh, they're like ah, yeah, yeah. But it's like really bitcoin. At the end of the day you'll see how this works. And I think long term, I think you'll see something like lightspark and they're pro, they're onto something I think pretty unique there because if you have a, effectively a, like Bitcoin and Lightning have this interesting dynamic where bitcoin stores value but then its other layers have programmatic programmability that can give you the liquidity of the, the profile of bitcoin size but also the programmability of being A technology that can almost be these loops in between to connect all this stuff. And I can't help but feel like that's where Bitcoin sits. Long, short to middle to longer term, until everyone's just like, why the hell are we bartering and why don't we do this? And I think the AI models in agentic commerce will be the first to use it because it's like, well, why wouldn't you just have the universal or uniformed asset go across digital value for all these versus swapping? It'll be the regulated firms that do the swapping for a while. Just because that's. Those are the walled gardens they've created.
- [16:57]
Liam
Yeah. I mean, what stuck out to me just from this clip in particular is like, you know, we're not worried about stablecoins. We're doing all this stuff, but at the same time, like, we're really fighting this bill, which would, which would basically allow others to compete against us. And so like, everything you're describing, Michael, makes sense, but to me, it's like that's their attempt at maintaining some monopolistic power over the rails while still adopting the technology. Right. Like, there's a fine line that diamond is trying to walk where he's like, you know, we're not Luddites. We're not. We're all about blockchain and stablecoin. But hey, we're going to fight this bill because it basically allows others to compete with us and infringe on our historical monopoly.
- [17:39]
Michael
Well, real quick, Liam, and this is, I'm curious your thoughts on this and whatever else you were to say, but it's like, this is the thing I can't wrap my head around is that there's probably other reasons, but one of the main ones is passing that yield, earn rewards, whatever, from the treasuries is a strategic imperative for the US because it needs more demand for the underlying. So that completely is juxtaposed to what Jamie Dimon and other banks are in the game of doing, of taking those deposits and then relending them or doing their thing and making the net interest on it. And so while he's super powerful, I don't necessarily know how they win this because there's just like from a geopolitical security, like from the admin side, they need this demand there. And if we don't have it, we've seen all the craziness with treasury demand. Like, what's the end state if you don't have demand for the short side of the short end of the Chart on the treasuries.
- [18:41]
BJ
Yeah, 100%. And I think that you could tell in Diamond's voice that he didn't feel confident. He wasn't coming from a position of strength and I don't know how many times I've ever seen that before. And to your point, Michael, I think that if they don't really offer any credible way to get rewards or yield on stable coins, it's going to push a lot of the stable coins offshore and people will loop it and do all the defi craziness. And on the secondary markets that's not going to be great because while you can Redeem Tether for $1, if you have certain amount of size, etc. If on the secondary markets there's all the NPC failures and looping and hacks with defi, that's going to cause a massive amount of issues there for everybody else who's going to use stablecoins more broadly there. So, yeah, I think that over the long term they're going to lose this fight. Even if this clarity and all of this implementation doesn't necessarily happen within whatever time frame people are expecting before the midterms, there's still a ton of money being spent on all of the digital assets and cryptos soft by fair shake and a 16C. So this isn't going away. And I could see it getting done even if it's not before the midterms too.
- [20:00]
Michael
Yeah, I don't know where it goes. I think now this kind of changes the dynamic of when clarity gets done because there's just a bunch of things going on. I still would like slightly go that it gets done this year. But to your point around, like if they didn't get this done and there was no rewards, it would go offshore and you would end up like right now there's already a bunch of hedge funds that own Treasuries. You'd end up with firms that would buy Treasuries and then create stable coins and then send them back out to the market, but it changes the dynamic. On the US it sounds like more like tether. Right? Because you're just going back to like an offshore firm that's, you know, issuing stable coins, not passing the yield back. So yeah, it's just, it's. It's one of those things you can't really wrap. I can't wrap my head around on what and why. Why they haven't been able to like reconcile.
- [20:52]
Liam
The banking lobby is, is it has power. But I, I would say like it would be A very bad precedent and a bad sign of, like, you know, the general government and Congress. If, like, Jamie Dimon can stop this from happening. Because to your point, there is, like, American interest involved in allowing these things to proliferate. So it'd be pretty crazy if what he's saying actually came true. But I don't think he actually has as much power here as he thinks he might.
- [21:23]
Michael
What's really fascinating about this too is anecdotally I've seen, like, I think this is happening in real time. My mind syncs still tell me, like, this gets done, but the back and forth is happening in real time around, to Liam's point, like, not coming from a position of strength because I remember, like, call it 60, 90. I can't remember the exact timing, but I've been in conversations with banks and the posturing, you could read that these earn and rewards aren't going to be allowed. And it was, like, subtle. And I was like, what do they know that I don't know? And then as it shifted, more positive that clarity was coming and rewards and all that, it's kind of naturally shifted. I was like, well, we can pass a little bit of tokenized deposit rewards, you know, like, so it's just in real time shifting beneath them. And it makes sense because if you think about the stigma of digital assets, Bitcoin in how it's been embedded, occ, fdic, all the things, the debanking, like, you know, we. I don't think it's on the list, but it was pretty asinine and crazy that CEO of Lead, you know, Jackie came out saying there's no such thing as deep banking. It's, like, empirically proven. There's, like, anecdotes, there's a whole, you know, thing. But anyway, point being is that I think it's just so fast, these changes, that it's catching everyone offside. And like, if there is a machine, the machine is just like, kind of. It hasn't gotten uniform yet and lubricated. And so that's where these, like, things are just throwing, like, you know, sand in the middle of it and. And I think just over time they'll all get in line. But this is what you're seeing in real time when you have a. A seismic shift in the posture around digital assets and also just the need for them on ramp.
- [23:09]
Sponsor
Finance is live and the Genesis program just launched. Over half the spots are already gone, and once they are claimed, they are gone for good. The first 210 signups get one year free of multi institution custody Highest on ramp rewards tier earn up to 5% 1 1/2% cash back on every swipe assigned copy of Gradually then Suddenly by Parker Lewis 21,000 sats deposited into your account upon activation. Sign up in 5 minutes on ramp bitcoin.com use the code TLT and do not wait. Once the sponsor claimed the genesis program closes for good.
- [23:44]
Liam
Yeah, well said. All right, shifting gears a little bit here. Let's talk about AI. I mean that's, we mentioned it sort of at the top. The everything else but Bitcoin rally, a lot of that is being driven by AI and AI related stocks as well as the two forthcoming IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI and also throw SpaceX into the mix. There a few different ways we can take this, but I thought this was a funny tweet from Michael Burry. Adjusted for inflation, the SpaceX anthropic and OpenAI AI IPOs will raise as much or more than the 300 Internet and TMT IPOs in, in 2000. So that's pretty wild. So yeah, these are like you know, trillion or multi trillion dollar IPOs that are being forecasted and then the other. I don't know if you guys caught all in this past week. I don't really listen to all in anymore, but I do like Bill Gurley and Bill Gurley was the guest and they talk a lot about OpenAI, anthropic regulatory capture and then also just like this notion of like the things that Anthropic says. I won't play this whole clip but like Bill Gurley kind of called it out. Like watch what these guys say, watch what they do because they really talk about this stuff as if they're like building a God entity. And that's why they're positioning themselves as like the safe AI company. They want more regulation. Now his one theory is like, well that's just to basically ring fence themselves and have their own regulatory arbitrage when these rules do get made. But the other sort of like scarier path that he describes is like they really do are just, you know, they, they really believe they're building a God. And so like they're, they're cautious but they're, that's almost a ploy to mask what's actually going on and how they, you know, how powerful they think their company's going to be. But any direction you guys want to take this.
- [25:44]
Michael
Yeah, I think there's a lot of fractals that exist in this like fiat kind of financialized world. And I think of. I couldn't help but see the parallel with the notion of these firms valuation and the market valuing them and chasing them in the same way the market chasing strategy and fundamentally on the other side of it, a lot of people are going to end up in losses. I think if you're early to a trade, in any momentum trade, you can make money in the same way you could have made money in hyper liquid. We could talk about it. It's like up like 3x. But you have to know their trades, you have to know you got to get out of them. And the two things that I'll call out, I haven't fully formed this thesis but there's. When you look at the data center, I think if you took out all data center expenditures from the past year, GDP in the US is flat. Everything is rallied into this asset class. And you look at the stock market as well and so it's much needed. You have these IPOs that are coming. The thing that nobody's talking about is what China did, the deep seq angle and how we've talked about like open source. A lot of the frontier models get really close to them and being able to manage that without the token spend. Also there's a lot of incentives and then there's a lot of value to accrue. If you manage the proprietary like layer that's feeding into the model that people are going to wake up to this, they're going to offer goods and services, especially as other sovereigns are releasing this because it's really kind of like economic and technological warfare. If you're able to like, you know, I think it could be by design, you have this market, you know these IPOs and then eventually you're going to see this kind of consolidation, a potential crash. And this is something we also talked about with BJ is that yes, you can chase some of these like memory stocks and AI stocks, but you have to remember that their trades, you have to get out of them and that you can't eat them. And that's really where there's just a difference between savings and then investing. And so if everyone's already talking about them and their valuations, like sure, you can't time them, there may be some upside, but you're going to see a rotation eventually and that's. And it's going to be at the time when nobody's expecting it. The only other thing that kind of ties into the early writer stuff and I've been thinking about is the anthropic from Their revenue in this past week, it's timely because I think 5, 5 from GPT came out like a week ago or two weeks ago and then last week was 4.8 from anthropic. That they truly are incredible in the amount of value you can get. And I think what's really interesting from an investment perspective or anybody building is investing in the people using these tools because they're still getting subsidized and you can still do an insane amount of work with much less than what you used to be able to do. And so whether it's proving out prototypes, getting a product market fit or scaling a business, these net new entrepreneurs that are using this technology and understand like independent of what happens with Anthropic and OpenAI, they're going to go find the frontier model that allows them to do that. They're going to set up the stack and then they're still going to be able to execute at a high level with very little capital outlay. And that's super interesting to me from like an investment perspective because that's really where the signal is not chasing, you know, the frontier model in an SPV that you don't know if you have rights to. But it's finding firms that are leveraging this new technology and that takes work. But I think that's really where a lot of money is going to be made.
- [29:17]
BJ
Yeah, there's. There's so much here that we could go into so many different directions. But one of the things that I was thinking about, especially in the midst of this latest anthropic raise, is Bill Gurley had a quote, I think it was like two years or something ago now, where he compared essentially with the formation of the Internet and Sun Microsystems, how they had their own enterprise, both desktop system and operating system. And that was essentially the de facto standard that everybody used. And for some period of time because it was easy and workable to get to a V1. But then over the next five years everybody moved to Linux because it was open. They could get more proprietary control over their data and everything around that. I think that there's a pretty strong analogy to what's going on with the frontier models versus the open weight models because they're not completely open source in terms of being able to reproduce them yourself in terms of all the training data, although people are saying that it's becoming easier and easier and cheaper to do that. But I just can't help but think that at the point when these frontier models stop being subsidized to a degree where people, you know, have to actually pay more for what they're getting. They're going to move towards those local models where they can run it themselves. And in that world I see kind of where EWS or Elon web services and SpaceX does super well because of everything that they're able to do in terms of getting data centers stood up in record times. But these just massive IPOs from the Anthropics and OpenAI's of the world would definitely kind of come crashing back to earth at that stage. But honestly these things are so valuable. But was kind of disappointed from the latest releases it I kind of thought that they were getting exponentially better. But now at least from what I can see just playing around over the past few days, they're kind of leveling off a bit. And if that continues to happen with next releases, it's going to almost be the fulcrum on which the economy is being. It has all the trading data and all the momentum at this point. So it will be interesting to kind of keep our eyes on and track moving forward.
- [31:33]
Michael
There's a really good. I have to go back. I shared it a while ago and he did another one, forgot his first name, but it's Patel who runs the research arm and he talks about there's real science to hit the equilibrium on the model, the tokens, latency for what the market needs. Because if you go too far in the future you don't actually know how to use it. And so I think we're right on the borders of that. Because if you think about it like this is something I've just thought of and I'm pretty sure it's directionally right. Like you would rather have call it a frontier model that's like two versions before that with your structured company data than a net new model with no structured and company data. And like most firms don't even know that, let alone are starting to structure their data that way. And if that's true, then you don't actually even need the frontier model. You would need like an admin to go set up an open source, you know, posted on whatever server you would be hitting, set up the auth and security setups and then get your structured data and then it would be able to be recursive in that and you get a lot more value than just like having your, your team, you know, pipe in there. I think that's kind of like what you've seen square and blocks do. And so I think that like you just get the. But these Firms will get so big TBD on the. I still think there'll be a bubble that pops there, but you will end up with like that public utility where a lot of people will never go that route. They'll just feeding these firms their data until they're kind of like gone or they've out trained it. The other thing that's just random that you're seeing more and more of it and it's actually a really good position to take is about a lot of this UBI and these firms. It's the notion and there's actually two sides of it because it sounds very socialist or leftist, but it's the idea that all this data is ours and it was trained on our info and they get to reap the rewards. So you're basically training and then you're going to lose the job. So as these jobs and these craziness happen is setting us up for how the next election will go and where they kind of start to, you know, call out these firms. And so like you can already see this going that way because it was explained, I don't know who was talking about but like in a certain country or like you would set up a sovereign wealth fund to help people with is their capital because like from a UBI or however it was getting made or retraining individuals because if you're anthropic or some of these companies and you've made all the money from this data and Google's a great example, you would set up a plan to get people, not instead of trying to accrue all the value, you figure out how to bring people along. But that's not what's happening here. So it's just going to be very interesting from a social perspective, like how this all plays out.
- [34:20]
Liam
Yeah, for sure. I mean it is interesting. Like I do feel like oftentimes we get stuck in the Twitter X bubble or echo chamber. Like the vast majority of sentiment around AI is pretty negative. Just like at least domestically in America, the average person who's not deeply using these tools is pretty adversarial against AI generally speaking. But just on the more of like the capital market side and what you were referencing Michael, around like, like, you know, how do you look at this or think about all of this from an investment perspective? Like you know, these are going to be some of the biggest IPOs, if not the biggest IPOs ever in the history of financial markets. And it's like okay, these things are going public at over a trillion dollars. Well how much, how much value is left, right. Like, you know, how long does anthropic take to go from 1 to 2 trillion to 10 trillion? And that's also, that bakes in a lot of assumptions around competition. And you know, the theoretical goal of reaching some form of AGI, like that's the, that's will be crowned the deity entity, all of these types of things. It's like that's a very precarious investment to be making in my mind, like to be buying these IPOs. But at the same time, we know there's a ton of sort of retail oriented demand around these things because they've been private for so long and you've seen the tokenized private shares that get a good amount of volume, but then the companies themselves come out and say, hey, you guys actually don't own any equity. And then they crash. And so it's like there is demand, but I would just be cautious around it. And to your point, Michael, there's other ways to play this. I think the other big trend and recognition of these dynamics I'm talking about over the past year, year and a half is like, okay, if we can't invest in anthropic or open AI in the public markets, well then like let's go downstream to the components, the materials, the, the rare earths that go into all of this, build out of the infrastructure and data centers and technology. And so that's, that's been the public market trade for the past year is like, you know, these niche, more niche bottleneck companies that are building materials or even just stuff on the energy side, the commodity side. But to your point, which I think you smartly pointed out, is like there's another way to play this where it's like you just invest in the entrepreneurs or the companies that are best leveraging the technologies while we're still in this subsidized phase. So I think that was a really good point. But anything else on the AI stuff before we move on?
- [36:57]
Michael
Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day this all actually is really simple and I feel pretty strongly about this is like everyone, the, the markets and information move so fast that you have to be a professional at the top of your trade to be trading around what you're referencing and finding like these rare earths and these companies. And so the real angle here is just to continue to deliver value while also being smart about what's coming. So you shield yourself from being a product of like the layoffs. But then also as you use more and more of this, you can Potentially even make more money whether it's on the side or starting your own business and then you just stack that into rare assets whether it's gold or bitcoin. I'm fairly confident, especially at these prices that have retraced from the all time highs that if you have a level of abundance specifically with intelligence and technology, it's going to trade back into scarce assets at some point and so you don't actually have to over complicate this. And then to your point that's the savings and then if you want to invest I think that's where you start to look at the best risk adjusted return. And then if you have the ability to go direct and find the right entrepreneur or something like early writers. But like I think that's the simplest way is literally just saving hard assets whether it's gold, bitcoin, have some cash because the market is volatile and then ultimately just continue to improve your own confidence level in your profession. Plus with these tools and you're going to be set up. But I think what a lot of people just change the conversation out there is you're just like putting this money in the stock market, you're missing these trades and you're, you know either lever, you're going lever long in some of the momentum trades in this asset class or the, the most recent stuff is like you're doing perps against like hard assets like silver and gold and you're just going to get wiped out because you have somebody on the other side of that trade that's doing this all day long. And not only are they doing it all day long but they're at the top of their field which you just can't compete with because you're a dentist or your ex professional working already 60 hours a week. How can you expect to compete from with somebody else?
- [39:05]
Liam
Michael, we're democratizing perpetuals all right? That's how everyone's, everyone's going to get rich.
- [39:10]
Michael
I don't think it was on the list but I mean that's just worth calling out because it was looked at as not a big deal. But the CFTC approving the first perpetuals contract with BTC USD, I think that's just big because obviously perpetuals existed since 2016, was FIPX that pioneered them but they, they're bringing them onshore anyway. So like you're just going to see more and more of that.
- [39:34]
Sponsor
Whether you've been in Bitcoin for 10 months or 10 years, managing your bitcoin wealth has been a fragmented experience. One Place to buy, another to custody. A patchwork of providers for your ira, your loans, your estate plan and everything in between. Every additional platform is another point of failure. And that is why we built Onramp Finance, a unified platform for your entire Bitcoin life. Enhanced brokerage cash bearing accounts with earn rates up to 5%. A card that earns cash back that you can use to stack more Bitcoin. Multi institution custody IRAs and built in inheritance planning all under one roof. The genesis program is live and spots are filling up fast. You can sign up in five minutes at onrampbitcoin.com and use the code TLT to lock in one year free of multi institution custody and our highest earn rate?
- [40:26]
Liam
Yeah, 100%. But yeah. Let's get to the digital asset roundup. We have a ton of links, ton of headlines from the past couple weeks. This one related to what you just referenced. Coinbase wins CFTC approval to offer global crypto perpetuals and options to US clients. There was a few Coinbase headlines so I'll just rattle through these. Coinbase launches Indian rupee Rails with perps access again in their expansion push. And then Coinbase taps Standard charter to expand multi currency funding Rails for institutional clients. So lots of Coinbase headlines here. Anything on these three?
- [41:04]
Michael
No, I think just more interesting to see it go into India but it makes sense with that Coin CDX or DCX acquisition and then yeah, the perpetual stuff I think is going to pick up a lot of steam. It's effectively the poly markets for financial services or financial assets.
- [41:25]
BJ
Yeah, just more of the same with a little bit more gambling out there, but nothing else to add there.
- [41:32]
Liam
Next on the list was Falcon X. We were just talking about some IPOs. This is another one. Crypto trading firm Falconx. Confidential files. We got these with the SEC for IPO hiring banks. What do you got on this one?
- [41:46]
BJ
I thought this one was interesting too as a bunch of other firms shelve their IPO processes. I think the last time they raised 8 billion at an 8 billion billion valuation in 2022. They're for those who don't know, prime broker, market maker primarily for digital assets, Bitcoin, et cetera, as well as the long tail but bought 21 shares, the ETF and some other stuff. I think that this is kind of two things. One, I think that there are a lot of people out there that are still discounting the wreckage of what happened on October 10th and potential market makers that are underwater. And these guys likely picked up some share just because of the liquidations of some of their peers and are probably trying to roll that momentum into
- [42:36]
Michael
actually
- [42:36]
BJ
going public and trying to ride that wave. And then also I think that this is just more of I could see them making a push into trying to get more qualified custodians ETFs away from the Coinbases of the world, just being a public company out there having more legitimacy behind them as they have 21 shares. So in think that they're probably going to do a little bit more on you know, trying to get some of that custody away from Coinbase. And then lastly, I think that it's just kind of a sign that despite where we are for just broader asset prices, you know, all these companies are continuing to, to go public and kind of accrue value despite where we are and kind of this isn't a sign that all companies are going to be dead, especially the dad side of things as the momentum kind of wear spin there.
- [43:30]
Liam
Michael, you got anything on this one?
- [43:32]
Michael
Yeah, I don't have much. I mean I think it's in very interesting timing for them to go public. I always wonder, you know, hindsight like the Bitco IPO if they would have preferred to wait just given the sentiment in the market more their stock trades. But yeah, I think the main thing that Liam called out to watch out for is like what this opens up from regulated markets, whether it's other custodians or financial services because I think that it's not everything app but if you're going to survive in this future world you got to integrate more services and offering you can't be a standalone. I think that was kind of an anomaly we saw in the first 15 years of Bitcoin's history, specifically before any of the clarity had come in with the genius act and then potential clarity act is that you could operate as a custodian, a bitcoin only firm. But as you start to try to get to scale, especially with Schwab, Morgan Stanley and other firms coming in, you need to get to a certain size, certain differentiated marketing and sometimes those help and do both when you have size and liquidity. So maybe that's a big component in seeing that. I think it was rumored two weeks ago Copper, they're a European custodian. They're one of I think only like really tier one custodians up in. They're effectively like the, the fireblocks version but in Europe, NPC Technology, they're looking to sell partner with a bank for this exact reason because as a standalone business when you have all these companies or people, letter clients competing with the standard charters of the world, the coinbases, the Morgan Stanley's, like what's your differentiator? You have to start to figure out even if the economics don't make sense. So it's just going to be interesting to watch. Playoff.
- [45:18]
Liam
Yeah, maybe just one sort of higher level comment on all of this. I mean I feel like for the past, call it six months, you know, we have a ton of headlines and deals to share that, you know, when, when people think about how bad, you know, the proverbial sentiment is out there. And you know, if we are in a bear market for bitcoin, like no other bear market in Bitcoin's history had these types of headlines on a weekly basis. Whether it's Tradfi, Fintech's incumbents that are getting into the space, whether it's these large IPOs, it's a completely different operating environment from a capital markets perspective. And just in terms of like the interest and the perception of this industry I think has totally changed. And while that's still not necessarily being reflected in price and you could say we're in a bear market, it's a very different bear market than any other historical bear market in that sense because in past bear markets literally no one cares. Everyone leaves, everyone shelves, their plans. No one is moving to integrate these things into their business. And that's just not true right now. So I think while it can be easy to get pessimistic around the price and what it's done, if there's anything that is a silver lining to all of this, it's like, well the interest is still there, people are still building around these things and that's just totally different than any other bear market.
- [46:45]
Michael
Yeah, it's a good call out. I mean there's a couple components to what you're sharing. Is that like the best thing somebody could do that was investing in Bitcoin was literally not pay attention to the price, just DCA and then go back to their crack. The problem is that this industry is so new, it captures the mind virus and so people pay attention, which is okay as long as you recognize you can't get shaken out by a lot of it. Whether the end of last year was the quantum fud or whatever else was going on. And this goes back to that, that richer, wiser, happier book about like all these investors, their common trait was literally like the, the Nick Sleep anecdote was that they put a terminal in their office but there was no seat around it because you couldn't spend time in front of it. You could just go for, you know, a couple minutes, whatever, as long as your legs could hang. Or Warren Buffett playing back gammon and whatever else he did and just sat on those, those investments and held them for a long time. And I think this was always a part of the negative side to the DAT trade that we talked about because as the market went to the downside and retraced, which it naturally always was, where's the confidence and conviction and fundamentals to hold that asset? Can you imagine seeing all this stuff across the nacas and all these different firms and sitting there not wondering if you can just get any money out so you can transfer back into bitcoin, gold or some AI stock versus in bitcoin. Yes, there's people probably selling right now because of the sentiment, but there is fundamentals there where a lot of people are picking up coins on the cheap. That doesn't exist in a lot of these other assets because they're momentum trades and they're, they're based primarily on the maliquidity in the system. And then there's certain number of, you know, units for that stock and so people trade them and there's supply, demand. But the bitcoin and gold thesis are fundamentally different because they're monies and they have a certain scarcity profile to them and that's just completely different than any of these other assets, specifically the DAT stuff. So as they retrace, it's like, well, everyone's questioning, well, what am I holding? And that's why you see the vitriol and all the sentiment on Twitter and people get really angry because it's like nobody wants to be told that their investment was a wrong investment, not a good investment, may not come back to all time highs, but it's just the facts of the fundamentals. And rather than throw good money after bad, you can cut your losses and go into the trade. It's the same thing with what happened in crypto where people got in, maybe they thought they missed bitcoin, they got into the better bitcoin, which was whatever crypto token that was sold to them, then it cuts in half or goes down 80%. They either get educated and they rotate or a lot of people just get this happened. Probably more than people rotating is they just got a complete horrible taste in their mouth and they never came back to this space. We saw this a lot in 22, when you saw the pensions and all the firms that stepped away. It wasn't until this past couple years that they kind, they came back because a lot of sentiment, the ETFs, et cetera, et cetera. But all that is like the, the underlying component to this notion of like there's all this momentum and there's all these things happening fundamentally to this industry asset class liquidity profile that it's going to come back. You can't say it's going to come back to all these assets. You can say it's going to come back to Bitcoin because that's the, that's basically the anchor to this whole industry. But that just changes based on like what you're actually exposed to in this asset class.
- [50:04]
BJ
Sure.
- [50:06]
Liam
All right. Few stablecoin related headlines. This one isn't necessarily new news. This was announced I think back in the end of last year that Cash app was integrating stablecoins into Cash App and now I guess it's being rolled out across all users. And so this was the headline from last week. It's something we've talked about a lot on the show in terms of. Well, there's a few different components. One is just the proliferation of stablecoins, which we've talked about at length, the tightening the fidelity between stablecoins and bitcoin being able to go in and out easily on the same platform. And then also the other thing I would call out is just
- [50:50]
BJ
I think
- [50:51]
Liam
the historical dogmatic nature of bitcoin companies being anti crypto, which makes sense, like altcoin space is, you know, full of scams. Obviously most blockchains don't need to exist. But stablecoins themselves, even if you just grant that they are modernized databases for dollars, there is some product market fit and value there. And integrating these things into a company like Cash App Block, you know, which I would still consider a bitcoin company, makes a lot of sense. And so I think this is a step in the right direction in terms of losing some of that dogmatic nature around, you know, not being able to integrate these things next side alongside bitcoin.
- [51:38]
Michael
Yeah. In the same way, like the MSTR selling, I just don't think much of it. Like I never thought about any of the dogmatic crypto whatever because I just look at these as Rails and they're like one step removed from when you click a stripe link for their connection. It's like you're just linking value in a seamless way. I think the, I haven't played with it, but some of the stuff I saw on Twitter is like it's underappreciated the level of complexity they're obfuscating from being able to deposit stablecoin. So you know, cash app is primarily been to like underserved markets. I don't want to say unbanked but people that are just like maybe necessarily don't want to pay the banking fees or it's just a lower tier of client per se and a lot of those people may have people outside of the country that could also download any wallet and whether they're sending or getting money, like if you had a cash app account and I want to send you a hundred bucks in usdc it's my understanding that when you receive it you're basically getting mere dollars or usdc. So you just have those dollars sitting there, you can move them back into your account, you can buy Bitcoin. I think there's a lot of people as value gets more into agentic commerce they're going to want exposure into stablecoins. And now you have this app that you can just park your dollars in and buy or just get access to stablecoins move them. There's just so much there that this opens up for them in the way that they're obviously have like world class UI UX that now you integrate another payment rail. It's really cool to see. And yeah, I think this is just the start we're going to see a lot.
- [53:14]
BJ
Yeah, I'd imagine it gets rolled out to most fintechs and I'm not that surprised that they maybe weren't even on this bandwagon a little bit earlier because a lot of bitcoiners have maybe even just a little bit of extra hesitation out there both because of the crypto side of things and also because of rumors and or tether potentially running completely collateralized and maybe not having enough backing of US Treasuries in terms of short term bills in order to kind of fund everything if there was an actual run on the tokens. But USDC obviously I don't know if they're completely genius regulated now or if they're going to be but publicly traded company so they have a little bit more assurances around it too. So yeah, I just would imagine that we're going to see more and more just rollouts of all this both to consumers and businesses.
- [54:08]
Liam
Yep. And along similar lines this was late Last week SoFi USD becomes the first stablecoin issued by a US national bank to launch on a banking platform. SoFi is the first national bank to offer stablecoin on a public blockchain. Now allows 15 million members to buy, sell and hold SoFi USD bank grade 1 to 1 redeemable US dollar stablecoin Thoughts on this one?
- [54:30]
Michael
So I, I can't remember where I saw it but what's interesting about this is if you look in that line under today's launch, building the ability for SOFI members to convert SOFI us to tokenize deposits allow members to earn interest and access FDIC insurance on the deposit, separate deposit accounts terms will apply. So right now there's still friction between fdic, OCC and whoever else is regulating the banks on regulated banks and then the stablecoin issuance and the tokenized deposits. So right now a lot of the banks are looking at the tokenized deposits because of the incentives we talked about earlier. This is a little bit on the other side of it which is very interesting that they announced the stablecoin because SoFi I'm not positive, I'm pretty sure they started off as the fintech then got the banking license so they have like that DNA to start. So they're looking at it from Challenger how do we like disrupt ourselves? So it makes sense they launch the stable coin, they can pass back a lot of that value and incentives and then they're looking to do the tokenized deposit aspect. But right now you cannot take a stable coin and convert it to that or if you have a stable coin and they convert back to tokenized deposits. So there's those rails aren't there? And I think they talk about it whether it's in this press release or it was publicly announced. And then the only other thing worth calling out is I believe they're using Bitco for a lot of this. So credit to Bitcoin I think on custody and then also I think it's their stablecoin Bitco has their own stablecoin issuance platform that they're also using.
- [56:03]
Liam
A few regulatory related headlines that we can just kind of walk through. Mastercard got a bit license. This was kind of surprising. Bit licenses, there aren't many of them that have ever been issued historically and MasterCard got one Paxos Security Settlement Company receives clearing agency registration from the SEC and then
- [56:29]
BJ
there was one more here, sorry, lost it.
- [56:32]
Liam
Any, anything on those first to.
- [56:35]
Michael
Yeah, really quick. You know that there's some level of cabal that exists in the machine because if you think about the bit license insane proposition that basically had like a wait list for three to five years that nobody, maybe one to two people were granted and now you've seen like at least 5 to 10 I do think initially on first glance, yeah, it's a little surprising, but it really isn't when you think about New York as the capital markets capital of the world. And if any assets are going to cross through New York, you need that vet license. And we're seeing this firsthand because the state of California is rolling something very similar out called D A FL Digital asset. I don't know the exact acronym, but it's exactly the same construct. If you're going to operate there, one of the largest economies in the world, not even the United States, you have to go and get licensed in that way. And so MasterCard doing that is effectively just making sure that they're crossing their T's when it comes to if you're going to have digital assets, because it encompasses all digital assets, whether it's stable coins, any kind of crypto derivatives. So yeah, that makes sense that they would have to get that if they're going to want to have exposure. Especially like if all this tokenized securitized stuff is going to happen around equities and mastercards, you don't want to play anywhere near that. You would also need this.
- [57:59]
BJ
Yeah, they bought BBNK or I don't know if that's closed or not too. And so I'm sure that they maybe were working on that for a while before that as well. But yeah, it's surprising that I just keep on going back to look how many stablecoin related headlines that we just ran through within the past 10 minutes or so. And the supply is pretty much flat since last year. So whenever this bull market really does kind of get starting to go and this adoption gets passed or this legislation gets passed, the entire market's kind of going to go so much higher in terms of total adoption of these digital assets which all will inevitably flow back to Bitcoin too.
- [58:37]
Liam
The other one I was going to pull up was bank of Sella becomes first Italian bank licensed for bitcoin and Crypto services under mica. And then the other big headline from this morning was Binance is getting into Stonks as well, the super app push. They're going to launch tokenized shares. Anything on either of those or anything else before we wrap? We got a few minutes here.
- [59:00]
Michael
No, I thought it was interesting they're doing it through Alpaca, who I believe Kraken's also leveraging as the broker, the tech that sits in between. I think the, the tokenized equity stuff is, is interesting. It got reported a week or two ago that the SEC was Going backwards and forwards on and it's still not settled on. Do you need the sign off from the. Between the issuer and then the underlying equity? The equity like the company. Right, because that was like it was rumored or reported on, but then they went back and said no, this isn't clear yet. Meaning like. And I think it was initially starting with public companies, but also would be open to private where you could tokenize. Just pick whatever public company Schwab, you didn't necessarily need their permission. That's what the SEC said about two weeks ago and they came back. But the point being is that you're going to see the tokenized asset class. I think a huge part of that is for offshore demand because there's a lot of people all over the world that couldn't get exposure to U.S. assets. And then naturally you'll see that play out into private shares. And then also derivatives, because a lot and different types of derivatives, whether it's cross collateralization all the way to perpetual tokenized vehicles, it's just like fundamentally changing. And I think like hyper liquid, is that like canary where you can watch and see that test bed because you're seeing, you know, tokenized equities, tokenized commodities, you're seeing the derivatives get laid on top. And we, we talked about this like over a year ago that then actually was going to get big enough where it was going to get folded into the state apparatus, which they're already talking about like what's going on here. But yeah, I think it just makes sense that you're going to see these crypto firms naturally push into it, which makes a lot of sense because I don't know the cohort. But like if you got into Binance or OkX or you're buying crypto and you're, you're effectively trading volume and those assets are. There's no more volume. Like nobody's speculating now. It's into commodities or it's into AI stocks and it'll be another thing. You're going to just want to park that next to this and you're just going to have. It's all going to blend together and you're not going to tell the difference. Which I think is the main theme for a lot of the things we're talking about is whether you're on the more conservative side, like I would consider on ramp is and you're going to put gold bitcoin dollars or you're going to be on the highly speculative side and you're going to offer perpetual features for Commodities and equities and other assets, prediction markets. You're just going to have to fold that together because it doesn't make any sense for individuals to go to six different places to manage their portfolio, quote unquote. So this is kind of just that theme in playing out in real time.
- [61:52]
BJ
Yeah, these tokenized stocks end up really taking off. Just the fact that these are the crypto exchanges are the first ones that end up really being able to offer them to the masses is going to just drive more adoption of just general approval of digital asset firms and infrastructure like that as a whole and inevitably back into Bitcoin. Which is kind of interesting to think that they could actually start to take some of these traditional brokerages shares on the margin because a lot of it ends up with trust is the main reason why they would pick a platform like that. And that's like all these relationships with Schwab and Fidelity are so sticky. But I don't necessarily know how much demand this is going to pull away from the traditional equities. But I'm definitely interested to continue to see how this plays out.
- [62:42]
Michael
I'll throw a grenade out to end this. To think about the thing where I think there is some signal here, and I think this can be achievable with transparency is how a lot of these things will be built on Bitcoin. And imagine you issue your shares via like some layer of Bitcoin. You have the rights and you're effectively getting rights to the dividends. So like if you're an exchange and it's all transparent, the volume, however you're able to do it and you're buying equity in that business and you have like that token issued and then you have rights that are distributed via satoshis to you in your wallet. I think that you end up there and I think before you end up there end up with a lot of people promising that this is kind of like what Hyper Liquid's kind of doing, right. With like buying back their shares and, and increasing. They're not passing the revenue directly back. It's the first mechanic is, is buying back the equity or the, the token. But why I'm throwing that out there is I could see there's like some actual signal to that if you wanted to buy equity, private's a little harder than public because of the, the public information and audit and all the things associated. But let's say either way if you can actually streamline that process from owning the underlying, have a transparent look through from the books and then the economic value deriving from it. And then it just gets passed directly to a wallet because there's no intermediaries, there's no brokers, I mean there's no banks, there's nothing there. I think that's actually kind of it
- [64:17]
Liam
interest in SAT based dividends. Who's building this? I think you're right. Somebody will do that.
- [64:24]
Michael
Yeah, yeah. I think it's just, it's a little between here and there. There's gonna be a lot of promises of that that aren't gonna get fulfilled. Yeah, but there's, there's something there because like you hear all this stuff about democratizing access and it's all beat motto. Yeah, it's all bs And I still think that the majority of people should save versus invest but there are people that will invest. That's how capital markets flow. And the reality is anybody should, you shouldn't just put it on because you don't think that they have the adequate competency to do it. But if you have the right transparency built in, it changes that dynamic versus having to invest in a private sock club. We have no idea what the hell is going on with the circular nature of anthropic is an example with the SpaceX stuff and then Nvidia. It's all just crazy. And so you know, one bad document comes out and that, that whole profile looks completely different.
- [65:23]
Liam
So anyway, all right gents, good place to wrap.
- [65:26]
Michael
Let's go.
- [65:27]
Liam
We got our next spurs matchup. Michael, we got the, we got the next. We know capital markets on the show, but we also know ball. It was always going to be Nick Spurs.
- [65:37]
Michael
Here, here's the thing. I think, I was thinking about it. I think like if you try to come down it should be for game five because I mean at least Nixon four.
- [65:47]
Liam
But yes, I'm down.
- [65:48]
Michael
Well, yeah, well because somebody like, if necessary, if it's closing out, it's closing out five, six or seven. It's probably not a sweep either way. And so that's the game to go to because. But yeah, I mean the tickets are insane. Anyone want to look at inflation? Just go look at the, the tickets.
- [66:03]
Sponsor
Crazy.
- [66:04]
Liam
The last time the Knicks won the finals in the 70s, courtside seats were $2,500. Courtside seats are like half a million dollars right now.
- [66:16]
Michael
My altcoin. Yeah, my altcoin I bought was, I bought these like these, this like tickets for next year. And if you buy some tickets for next year, like one of the, the like books you can get like 10, whatever, 20, half season, full season, you get rights to every game for every deal in the playoffs at cost. And so the trade was like, oh, well, get these. You can sell them if you don't, but you still want to go to the game, but then you get every series. And so the tickets that we got are like, right there, and they're basically like nothing compared to what they're being sold for.
- [66:50]
Liam
So do you get to automatically roll that forward to next season?
- [66:53]
Michael
I think that rolls forward to like the playoffs of next season. So, like, if you have any kind of like, setup for the season, then that you get every. And depending on how many tickets you get for the season, you could get like two seats for every playoff round. I just got one, so.
- [67:08]
Liam
Yeah.
- [67:10]
Michael
And my wife. My wife is not the biggest, you know, family member. It's like I'm kind of married her, so I gotta. I. I just have to untake her.
- [67:19]
Liam
It'll be fun.
- [67:21]
Michael
Yeah, absolutely.
- [67:22]
Liam
Winning game one, by the way.
- [67:24]
Michael
You think so?
- [67:25]
Liam
Yes.
- [67:26]
Michael
Every game I go to, they. The spurs lose. So that would, that would support. That would.
- [67:29]
Liam
That would track. Yeah. If you're gone.
- [67:31]
BJ
I don't.
- [67:32]
Michael
I don't think so. What do you. What do you think? Where do you legitimately.
- [67:36]
Liam
Let's.
- [67:36]
Michael
Let's call it here. Where. Where do you see the series going?
- [67:40]
Liam
So, I mean, I genuinely think the Knicks could sweep them. But. But if you want. If you want, you know, a real take, we steal game one, spurs take game two, we come back to msg, go up three one, spurs win game five to make it three two, come back to msg, team four.
- [67:58]
Michael
You say spurs win game four.
- [68:00]
Liam
No. So Knicks win three and four at msg, back to San Antonio for five. San Antonio wins. Makes it three two.
- [68:08]
BJ
Or.
- [68:08]
Liam
Sorry, makes it. Yeah, makes it three two. Knicks win four two. In game six at msg, Manhattan burns to the ground.
- [68:15]
Michael
Yeah, I don't. I mean, that's pretty wild statement. This Bird is getting swept. But yeah, I don't know if you listen to Liam.
- [68:23]
Liam
Didn't think we could sweep the Cavs. What happened? We swept the Cabs.
- [68:27]
Michael
I mean, the Eastern Conference has been like the little brother to the NBA
- [68:31]
Liam
for literally not support, not supported by the data. That's a, That's a lack of ball knowledge. Take right there.
- [68:40]
Michael
I don't know if you listen to it, but it's worth going and listening to the, The Bill Simmons recap after, after that game because there's some really funny takes around the New York and just like, they're like, you may never see me again. Like, I just made it. I mean, they never make it out of. If they win anyway. Yeah. All right, Liam's typing, so we got to go. He's.
- [69:00]
Liam
He's.
- [69:00]
Michael
He's done. But I will say spurs and fog.
- [69:04]
Liam
Okay.
- [69:05]
Michael
Yeah.
- [69:06]
Liam
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.