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- [00:00]
Michael
You can't forget that Charles Schwab is one of the largest financial institutions on the planet earth. They manage I think over 11 and a half trillion dollars in clients capital. And I've always thought and have been talking about that. There's a number of reasons where the price has stayed like pegged to this band. And one of the big ones was that tradfi needs to turn on all the plumbing. And we're seeing Morgan Stanley, we're seeing Goldman, we're seeing Schwab come in. And I think that all this is long term, long term and long tail bullish for market sentiment. The knowledge of sophisticated parties that are looking at Charles Schwab getting into this, it starts to just eat away at those notion of woke. Digital assets are a fad. They're going away like some of the largest institutions taking a stake and where they're going to play is that signal that this isn't going back in the box.
- [00:47]
Liam
It all comes down to computers communicating.
- [00:51]
Michael
The information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless. Artificial gold, is it still rat poison? Probably rat poison squared.
- [01:05]
Brian
We need to get into the world of okay.
- [01:07]
Liam
This is actually foundational technology.
- [01:10]
Michael
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 of the major forces for reducing the roll of gam. The one thing that's missing that will soon be developed is a reliable e cash.
- [01:36]
Onramp Finance Announcer
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- [02:22]
Brian
Gentlemen, gentlemen. Welcome back. Big special episode of Final Settlement. Today is Monday, April 20, 10:55am Eastern Standard Time. This will air Tuesday and by the time this hits the airwaves, big announcement. We just got a little little teaser trailer of what on ramp will be announcing tomorrow or today. If you're listening to this on Tuesday morning on ramp Finance, probably the biggest box we've ever done. Cat is out of the Bag. Lots to discuss around this. We'll have some normal topics as well. Lots of things have happened in the news in digital assets and crypto world defi land tradfi eating crypto. But first we gotta talk about this big launch. It's been a long time in the making and maybe Michael, I'll just hand it to you to kick things off and we'll riff a bit on different feature sets, the value prop, all that.
- [03:20]
Liam
Um.
- [03:20]
Michael
But yeah, appreciate it. Super excited. Before you listen, if you have anything in Aeve or whatever that stuff is on Coinbase, you probably should go check that out.
- [03:29]
Brian
I. I think it's pronounced A. I
- [03:32]
Michael
couldn't, I couldn't help but think about. We've talked to folks looking at different loans and there were these like they were institutional people, do you remember that? And they were like I'm getting 4% on a Coinbase. And it was like, okay, sorry. But anyway, yeah, super, super exciting cats out of the bag. We played that video. It'll be out live. There was other pods that'll be coming out this week. Before going into exactly what's being announced, I do want to share kind of a little bit of the genesis of this. It's probably over half a decade in the making. I talked a little about it on Joe's pod. But there is this reality that building in this space, being all in bitcoin for a very long time, you realize that a, you still need access to dollars. You still have, you know, bills, denominating dollars and the rest of the market. If they're going to come in this space, it's just going to require unified experience for a number of reasons. The reality is that the administration, all the things associated post FTX just stigmatized and it was very hard to get this stuff done and post genius act post new administration. The ability to build on native finance rails and offer not only bank like services but also pack pass back A lot of the unit economics that the banks weren't able to or aren't doing really made this all possible. So we signed a partnership with Stripe with the ultimate vision to provide bank like access to our existing clients and then net new clients. So what does that mean? It means up to 5% earning rewards on cash with US 1 1/2% and a card that you can spend. That card will be live in a few weeks you can join Waitlist, the lowest cost bitcoin brokerage. The ability to sweep that cash, whether it's excess earning rewards or dollars into that IRAs lend against your bitcoin and a whole bunch more. We have the new terminal revamp that are going to be coming, but the reason for doing this is, is a fewfold. One of them is if you're an existing client, our whole job is to continue to add value. So the reality is most people with significant material bitcoin allocations have like three to five different accounts. And most bitcoin firms do one or two things really well. There's not a home for their personal wealth. And then as you think about net new clients that have been looking at on ramp, but they've been on the fence. They've been on the fence because of whether they think costs. We can't work with them. We're not a unified experience. They just signed a contract. We're basically taking that barrier away by adding more value. We'll talk a little bit about our genesis program. It's limited to 210 people. But part of that is anybody that comes on will get some of the highest tier rates. And also if they bring over more than two bitcoin, they'll get their first year. So it's a perfect way to come on and also get, you know, a trial with multi institution for no cost. But then the real reality, and I think this is where Brian gets really excited because he came from this background, is ultimately how do we bridge bitcoin? Like we deeply care about this space, we deeply want to cross that chasm. It's sad, but no matter. And I know everyone listening, most people feel this. When you talk to peers, when you talk to people in tradfi, when you talk to your family. Bitcoin is so stigmatized. It doesn't have like the level of understanding and I think even gold in some respects, the whole notion of gold bugs. And so we've always thought of how do we build a firm that crosses that chasm into making it simple and easy for people to preserve and save their wealth, grow it, but also obfuscates a lot of the complexity. So the hard part was the custody because we like to say with a click of a button you get 10x the security at 110 of friction and costs associated with like self custody. It's not to say self custody didn't have a place. It's to say that most people, if we're going to get this to the masses, will not want to have 12 words in a, in a hardware device. And so that reality, you can do the custody but then if you still have to wait for the rest of the market to learn what we know and that, you know, inflation's not going away, debasement's not going away. We could play defensive, but that's not the mode of the firm. The idea is we go and attack the market and play offense by just offering better financial rails and services for the rest of the world that wants to get better interest or earning on their dollars, that wants to sweep into BTC or gold. We'll have gold as part of this parked in the Royal Canadian Mint to start. You can take delivery of that and then sweep into bitcoin or gold. And then long term if they decide to, they can still take it in self custody if they'd like or they can move over into multi institution custody. And so there's a lot more to say but I'll pause there because I know the guys have a lot of thoughts. There's been a lot of work. Our team, I have to shout out our whole, entire team, we'll talk more about this on the last trade. But everyone across our design, product, engineering, operations, marketing, it was a very heavy push to get this out before this next bull run we think is upon us at some point this year that people are just going to need a net new place or a unified experience for their bitcoin financial services. And we're hoping we'll be that for serious bitcoin allocators.
- [08:32]
Brian
Yeah, very well said. I think, you know, as you mentioned, a lot went into this and I would say, you know, we've kind of been working towards this for a long time but you know, we needed to start with the most important thing which is the actual foundation of how you custody bitcoin. That's your sort of long term savings. And it was really important that we got that right and built trust around multi institution custody and what it is, that architecture, that design surface. But ultimately we always kind of knew like we needed to broaden the aperture or the scope of what on ramp could be and should be, which is really like, you know, sounds a little cheesy but like the money platform of the future. It's like this is where we think the world should go in terms of actual wealth preservation. And I think if you compare and contrast what we're launching today versus like where the rest of the market is kind of headed.
- [09:28]
Liam
It's.
- [09:29]
Brian
If you think about the coinbases of the world, the Robinhoods, all the prediction market stuff, hyper financialization and gambling, that's the wrong direction in our mind. You don't need to speculate and recklessly gamble to grow and Preserve your wealth. Really what you need is sound money secured correctly and then having some amount of working capital that's in dollars, which, you know, the reality today, bitcoin or dollars are still, you know, the unit of account for most people. People have bills and liabilities to pay in dollars. So that needs to be tightly integrated. And we've talked about this on the show, you know, at length the past 12 months or so. In. In the sense of tightening that fidelity between dollars and bitcoin is really, you know, how. How financial platforms are going to look as we move forward is, you know, being able to very seamlessly, without a lot of friction, move in between dollars and bitcoin and even gold to just live your financial life in a way that is, you know, conservative, principled, not reckless, not needing to move out the risk curve and go on prediction markets and invest in all these different crypto tokens. Like, you really just need bitcoin gold and some dollars for working capital. And that's how you can grow and preserve your wealth into the future. And the other thing I'll say is, like, you know, you could launch something like this without doing that heavy lift up front on the custody side, but I don't think it would be as powerful and have as much staying power as what we're bringing to market in the sense that, you know, none of that matters if the custody isn't figured out, basically. And that goes from bitcoin, but also to gold. Like Michael, you sort of alluded to this, but through our partnership with Argo, we're going to be able to give people direct gold access. So not just a tokenized claim, not just an ETF exposure. So the same sort of thoughtfulness and rigor that we've applied to bitcoin custody also spans to the side of gold and your sort of analog sound money. So that's the foundation that we're building on. And I think it can be the money platform of the future for people that are just conservative and want to just save and grow their money.
- [11:46]
Michael
Yeah, I want to say a few things, and I know, Liam, you have some thoughts to add to what Brian was sharing. And one of them is the reality that we just bypass and it's the inertia of the 60, 40 and the machine that gold is money. When you look at all these metrics around sovereigns, getting rid of treasuries, holdings, the price, and bitcoin's the future money, and then we have dollars. And there's this reality that nobody. There's a philosophical And a technological, I think innovation or leading that we're working on here. One of them is on the technological side that nobody's really put those two forms of money that are true money without counterparty risk, outside money that and one's monetizing and one is continuing to grow and it's monetization just because of debasement. And then the reality that dollars will move, dollars will exist for a very long time, TBD on how long and so individuals need it. The other side of that is on the philosophical side because I think this actually gets widely underappreciated is I know that there's been a lot of slack out there and you know, God bless you guys that are clients or listen and that also are long dats or stretch or whatever because everyone can do what they what they like. I think the idea is that independent, if we're right, then it's the right move to articulate the risk. If we're wrong, you still in my view would want a firm that is very conservative and conscientious about this because as you and your family look to preserve their wealth, that's how a brand forms is when you are fiscally and conservative with the products that you're offering to the market. So you know, when your friends and family actually need to go into these trades to get out of fiat, they will have a place that won't have things pushed in front of them. And you always know the next hottest trend won't be there. And so I think that's a fundamental important part of next gen financial services or the money platform of the future is that there's two forms of money and then there's this credit based money and dollars that we have to operate in and to unify them together and build a service. And an anecdote is I was on a small family vacation, I had a brother in law that hasn't bought bitcoin and he's you know, great build, great guy. But point being is he, he had like some debt on a home improvement and he was either do I pay it off or have extra. He got paid for something and they had like $40,000 in excess cash. And I was like, well we have this new thing coming out and you can pick your per your ratio on BTC dollars or if you think bitcoin's risky, you can put that $40,000, get your 5% and take that earn and park that in bitcoin. And so this just opens up the aperture for the different ways that individuals will want to Come in. So I think it's going to be very interesting. We will pull up the page and kind of walk through some of it. And then there's a huge Genesis program that I mentioned earlier that I think a lot of listeners are probably very interested in before that. Leon, I know you've been, you know, behind the scenes seeing what we're working on and just curious how do you think about it and then also just how you think about it from your network perspective that is like know something's up. We posted a chart today. I think that the debt has just gone insane. And there's a reality that people need solutions but they just don't necessarily know where to go.
- [14:55]
Liam
Yeah, 100%. There's a lot here on the network too. A lot of my friends, family, they're really open to bitcoin in general too. They know that there's something off and bitcoin just had such a biblical run that they know that there's actually something there. Despite a lot of the industry just being fly by night. I think in terms of this, well, one of the theses that we've had at early riders for a long time, and I know that you guys probably share some of this too is just the financial services are going to improve so greatly as the barriers from just a stigma around digital assets, new administration changes and the laws eventually catch up that you know, banking, banking like services and bitcoin financial services are going to compress and really just offer consumers much better financial services. Up till this point there's been a lot of debanking. No banks pass along any sort of interest to their consumers. And so that's forced consumers to go out further on the risk curve either. You know, you could even count the 60, 40 going into really long term bonds and equities, but people just haven't had the right way to save their money. And so things like this coming out is just extremely useful to everybody who doesn't necessarily want to take that risk but knows that there's much better products for them out there. I think that things like this and even shout out to what some of the guys at river are doing are really great products. And ultimately it's something that we've always thought about. The bitcoin companies and companies who are net newer to this space, who really understands what consumers actually want are the ones who are driving financial services that actually offer customers what they really want and need while the banks are which are more bureaucratic and slower are really lagging behind in the space. So this is A great product and super excited to have it out there too.
- [16:59]
Michael
Yeah, I think that makes sense. Just to reiterate, we've talked a lot about this. We truly believe there's going to be a natural convergence with TRADFI adopting these services and then native firms building them. And this has a lot of downstream ramifications with our partnerships with banks and other large institutions because now we start to look more like a financial institution, bring in clients, deposits. So Brian's running through this. You'll naturally see a new kind of dashboard, new website. There's a lot that's come out we'll talk about more probably on the last trade. But you'll see on your dashboard you'll have the ability for your primary vault and then your earn account, trade account, bitcoin back loans if you'd like and then the card if you want to sign up for that wait list. We also have a whole revamp of the on ramp bitcoin terminal. So for anybody looking to get into that, all you have to do is sign up for Onramp Finance. There's no cost as well associated. So the reality is that we want to make the friction as little as possible for either individuals that are just looking for a better bitcoin financial application or individuals that are looking to learn more about on rent before they decide to, you know, park assets in multi institution custody. They can start with that relationship where this gets relevant for anybody listening. Because I don't know how many spots and how fast this will take off is we have the Genesis program and we'll go back to that chart above. But ultimately for the first 210 founding members of signing up for on ramp finance, you're going to get locked in at the highest reward tier that we provide the market. One year if you have over two Bitcoin you want to bring over in multi institution custody, good friend Parker Lewis is going to sign gradually, suddenly books we're going to include in a welcome package. So never really done swag. This will be the first time that we'll be sending out for those first participants a bunch of other things but that that book is probably the pristine thing. Full access to me from a tax perspective for the first 90 days the 1.5% on the cash, there'll be some sats deposited in that account and then the reality is that you will get part of this like first cohort of 210 people, the ability to provide feedback because we have no shortage of things planned for the market and you'll be able to Just participate in that whole endeavor. So Brian, anything you want to add there and then maybe you can talk about that calculator because I think that's going to be a pretty impactful thing for the market and how we show kind of like us as it compares to anything else that people are doing from a construction perspective.
- [19:27]
Brian
Yeah, maybe before we get to the calculator, I think that this sort of comparison matrix is helpful just in terms of sort of demonstrating all the value that's packed into to what we're offering here relative to whether it's other exchanges or even Bitcoin ETFs. There's a ton of value. And this is always sort of what we've driven towards is multi institution custody is the base, it's the foundation, it's the bedrock. But it's the financial services that are built around that that really turn what is could be perceived as something niche in terms of, you know, differentiated bitcoin custody into something that looks and feels much more like a private bank. And so anything from IRAs, loans, inheritance planning, insurance, all that's going to be baked into the on ramp offering. And now there's kind of a natural glide path that someone can come in to this finance tier at no cost. So it's free to sign up for on ramp finance today. And it's really, you know, how we originally were talking about this, like I want to say close to a year ago, like this really is like the on ramp to on ramp in some sense where you know, you can create an account for free, you can start buying bitcoin, you can now earn on your dollars, so your dollars aren't just sitting idle in a traditional bank account. You can start stacking bitcoin, you can take out a loan, you can take out an IRA account, and ultimately to get the most out of the on ramp finance platform, it behooves you to sort of go along that upgrade path and open a multi institution custody vault that allows you to unlock higher tiers of rewards. And so there's a really nice sort of story here in terms of getting people in the door, meeting people where they're at, in terms of being able to test out the platform, see how it works, see how it feels before committing to, you know, paying custody fees with us. And like I said, you know, we, we built, you know, the foundation before we did all this because I think that was super critical to get right and create really a lasting offering here.
- [21:45]
Michael
Sorry, can you pause back on that chart because it's pretty right above it yeah, it's pretty incredible because look, we love a lot of the entrepreneurs in this space. I think every bitcoin company does something really well. Our goal is really from a market perspective. The reality is nobody want everyone hates Hulu, Netflix, hbo. Like people want a unified experience. And when you think about bitcoin has been treated by the market as a second class citizen, specifically in tradvy. And with this genius act, we're just trying to get ahead of this because we believe this is where the market's going. But it's a pretty wild thing to see. You get, you know, multi institute custody if you want rewards on cash, rewards on spending, the whole terminal. It's going to be built out with proprietary research along with all the data analysis of bitcoin, ira, multi institution custody, Bitcoin backed loans, inheritance planning, Dynasty Trust planning, Lloyd's of London Insurance, direct ownership. The point in calling all of that out is that our real goal, and it's ambitious, is to be a generational business. And if we're going to do that, we have to continue to raise the bar and add more value. There's a reason where a lot of people haven't heard of us. We never went the traditional route. I like to joke and say a lot of people short mic or on ramp because we never gave exposure to the market. And we'll have some announcements coming out on capital raises and where we're going. But I think it's important to share who we are and what we stand for because we talk to clients all day long and they're done playing hot potato with the underlying. Since the beginning of bitcoin, whether it's Mount Gox, Genesis, ftx, Celsius, Swan leaks, hacks, whatever it is, they continue to have to move the asset. And the reality is when we get into that six and seven figure band in bitcoin, things are going to naturally break because the exact way that everyone custody manages financial services is the exact way we did it back in the day. Yes, we've had some learnings and ideally a lot of these companies never have any problems. But the reality is there's a new financial design layer in this multi institution model that can protect everyone and provide better financial services. The last thing I'll say is if you even have any semblance of believing that where this all goes and it'll be us and it'll be banks doing this is you'll have multi institution in custody, you'll have a million dollars, a hundred thousand, ten million, whatever the number is. And you'll just be able to manage financial services out of there. Meaning you have assurances from titling from legal assurances with the custodians from Lloyds of London. But then you'll just tie on additional assurances legally where if you need to take a hundred thousand dollar loan out, you'll encumber that $200,000 meaning 800,000 is free floating available for use. That 200,000, you'll sign an agreement, it'll sit there, you won't have to do anything. You'll be able to get your hundred thousand dollars in like 50% loan to value, have that deposited whether it's a bank we're powering or in our platform. You'll have those dollars deposited seamlessly. You'll be able to spend on them, get all the capital back. And that's just the base layer. We're working on stuff on mortgages across the board. So hopefully this gives a good like picture into who we are and what we're thinking about because we see where the market's going I would like to say maybe clearer than a lot of other firms specifically in Tradify. And so the, the idea is to get ahead of where this price goes and then the reality of where people want to go to park their capital.
- [25:02]
Brian
Yeah and I'm going to get to this calculator but first I did want to highlight you mentioned a revamped terminal. If you're familiar with with on ramp and you've been following us time you may know that we have the onramp terminal powered by new Hedge. It's you know effectively the Bloomberg terminal for bitcoin went through a massive overhaul the past few weeks and there so there is literally thousands of charts and various data points within the terminal here you can see all this on chain data lightning hodl waves recently had a ton more sort of macro oriented data. Correlations, options, data, derivatives, structured products. Really literally everything you could think of everything in the mining space as well. And this is included within on ramp Finance account. And two things I want to call out about this just to really highlight like the value here. Most sort of like crypto data platforms or providers charge like pretty hefty monthly subscriptions anywhere from like 50 to $100 to have like full access and be able to download the data. You can download all the data into a CSV or an Excel file from any of these charts for free if you have an on ramp Finance account. Like that is insane value for a free tier account. And also just recently they added the ability to have API access. So you can take the APIs from all these charts, throw them into Claude or your favorite Droid and start playing with the data yourself. Create versions of these charts for yourself and your own research or reports or just for your own interest. So there's massive, massive value packed into this. And again, you get that at the free tier of on ramp finance. But maybe I'll switch back here to this calculator that we mentioned. And this kind of speaks to
- [27:06]
Michael
what
- [27:07]
Brian
is now a capability within the platform, which is to basically flex how much you want to keep in dollars that are earning up to 5% versus having a Bitcoin cold storage. So let's sort of oscillate this to 10 years. Maybe monthly contribution will do, just 1000 for round numbers. And so you can then flex sort of the allocation to straight bitcoin and your cash earning up to 5% and see what that does over the designated time frame. And then you can also play with the bitcoin CAGR assumption here if you want to be a little bit more conservative or you want to get mega bullish and say it's going to be 50% going forward. But this is just a helpful tool for anyone who's thinking about, and we know this in speaking to existing clients and prospective clients. The reality on the ground today is that most people are not 100% in Bitcoin, particularly if they're just starting out. They're just building an allocation. They're not going to be 100% in Bitcoin from day one. They're going to build an allocation over time. And what better way to build an allocation than to be able to calculate in real time what kind of split you want between bitcoin and cash, and then also be able to model out if that cash is working for you up to 5%, how you can then take those earnings, take those rewards and immediately convert them into bitcoin to add to your accumulation trajectory. So I think this will be really helpful for folks as they think through how to use the platform and really how to, you know, grow, preserve, manage their wealth going forward.
- [28:41]
Liam
Love it.
- [28:41]
Michael
Well, if anybody's interested, you can find out on the website. You can book a consultation. We want to make this a regular show, so we'll go into the rest. We shield honor if enough. But we really are very excited and there's going to be a lot more coming from podcasts, webinars, spaces. So if you're interested or just shoot me a note if you have thoughts, feedback, things you want to see in the terminal or added to the platform. Michael honored Bitcoin.com. love to chat and we'll respond to everyone.
- [29:07]
Brian
Awesome. Well said. We will move on. We won't make this all about us. A lot has happened over the past week, and that's not even including wars on, wars off, straits closed, straits opened. A lot has happened in the crypto defi world in particular. That's where we wanted to go next. There was a ton of hacks last week, and this is sort of. There's a lot of different angles. We can take this because part of it's what we've described around, whether it's Mythos or all of these frontier AI models that are basically adding to the ATTCK surface, which was already pretty large for a lot of these crypto and defi protocols. But what we're seeing now is a real acceleration in terms of the attack surface and basically the security incidents that are happening. So pulling up right now, this was last week, kelp Dao, which to be honest, I never heard of, appears to have been exploited for 293 million, making it the biggest DeFi hack of 2026. And then here's sort of a list of some other ones really, you know, just over the past few months. So over 600 million in DeFi hacks in just two weeks across 10 different protocols. So there's a lot, a lot of different ways we can take this. But, Michael, I know you have some. Some thoughts on this.
- [30:33]
Michael
Yeah, I mean, the first one was seeing this play out yesterday, and. And I can't help but think some of the bitcoin price action was associated with it. It's like, man, these guys are going to take us down again. Because we saw what happened October 10th and where the market kind of shifted. And it's really wild when you see. So one of the stats that were reported was the past 24 hours. There was over half a billion dollars, I think 600 million that's just been wiped out from these hacks. And when you look at pictures like Brian showing or anybody that spends time on Twitter, you see like all these connections and ways that these protocols are duct taped. And I just can't help but think about how they mirror the counterparty risks that exist in the tradfi system, because these are a little bit more technical, but they're also technical with leverage. So they kind of play off of each other when you're able to technically breach something, and then you can wipe out some of the leverages. As aave, I Think one of the biggest lenders in the digital asset or crypto space. It really just highlights this simplicity notion of savings versus investing and where you may theoretically be able to get some more upside in the crypto world or even in the equity world. But the reality is it's all built on this like false premise of too much debt, not enough dollars. And so whether it's you losing because in nominal terms you're still not keeping up, or are you getting paid for that counterparty risk, I think we're just going to continue to see this. And then the other side of that structure and incentive model is really what you highlighted with this proliferation of AI, regardless of its mythos or not. Vercel was also breached yesterday, which is a big deal. I think Kraken was breached. They're like being held for ransom for their clients data that this stuff will only continue. It hasn't been popular for us to say in the same way it hasn't been popular for us to talk about the physical things that are going to happen because it feels like fud, but in reality is always easily forecasted because if you have a bearer asset that's going up into numbers you've never seen, you have very desperate people in the physical world that will increasingly try to harm us in the same way in the digital world, you'll have more and more people that will try from any place on the planet earth with a computer to steal that asset. So it's really unfortunate to see and sadly I think that this is just going to increase exponentially with the proliferation of AI and the price associated with all these digital assets.
- [32:55]
Brian
Yeah, it's crazy. What I'm scrolling through on the screen right now is this person basically created a thread of all the different protocols that were in some way affected by layer zero being compromised. And so they were pausing basically any bridges that were using layer zero. And it's just like literally dozens of protocols that had to pause what they were doing. And it speaks to what you referenced around the broader crypto, particularly the defi world is so interconnected and so fragile, just given all of the proprietary smart contract risk that exists. And then as when it's tied all together, like one thing breaks and then a lot of other things break. I think the other big sort of start, maybe startling to some headline, was AAVE breaking. We referenced it at the top of the show. AAVE was always looked at as the most robust or safe defi platform in crypto and even that is coming under stress. And so the other thing I wanted to pull up was this is just a table basically showing the exodus from defi protocol. So TVL stands for Total Value Locked. So basically any funds or capital that is being held on these protocols either for staking or generating some kind of yield and you can see the seven day change in tvl, these things are just dropping off a cliff. So people are realizing not only are there structural issues with the interconnectivity of all this stuff, but there's also just a massive attack surface in terms of the smart contract risks and these things being able to be exploited and these hacks are just accelerating. And so why would you keep money on these things? Even if you're earning some crazy defi yield, the probability that your allocation goes to zero is higher than ever. So no amount of nominal yield is really worth potentially that going to zero. Liam, you got any thoughts on all this stuff?
- [35:03]
Liam
Nothing completely unique. I would just say, yeah, the technical aspect that's baked into this as being the real innovation is actually going to be a massive net negative when all these models as they already have, really start to accelerate their improvements. And many of these protocols and chains can't necessarily keep up with the attack services just because there's so much complexity that's baked into this, which is obviously the enemy of security and simplicity.
- [35:30]
Brian
Yeah, then there was this, this headline from last week that Anthropics Mythos reveals a growing security gap. AI finds flaws far faster than companies can patch them. And then you had a similar or related headline that Coinbase has been in close communication with Anthropic because they want access to Mythos basically before the market or any potential attackers get it, so they can try to shore up the litany of, you know, security threats that probably exist across all the protocols that they support.
- [36:02]
Michael
Yeah, we don't have to go deeper here, but I think it's just worth calling out or reiterating. It's very curious that you had all this quantum fud which we've discussed, how crazy theoretical and, and now there's second and third order ramifications coming from that around, you know, address migration and the likes, but that you had this come out because this is truly existential if you think about it from an institutional perspective of like why would you park any capital into venture into the assets into infrastructure that is supporting this thing that has shown from first principles they don't think about risk in the right way. And so that I think, just worth highlighting that the, the proponents that were out there champion the quantum situation. And again, we've already discussed how theoretical it is. These are. This is real right now, people losing a bunch of funds.
- [36:53]
Onramp Finance Announcer
So.
- [36:55]
Brian
Yeah, well said. Maybe shifting gears a bit. There were a few pretty important tradfi headlines from the past week or so. So I'd say the biggest one was probably Charles Schwab really turning on a lot of things, namely spot crypto trading launched last week. So they announced that Schwab Crypto, a spot crypto trading offer that will begin phased rollout to retail clients in the coming weeks. Direct access to Bitcoin and Ethereum trading, combined with educational content and experienced professional support at a great value. You know, Schwab is one that we've talked about. They sort of been signaling this for several months. So this isn't necessarily unexpected or a surprise. I think people have sort of seen the writing on the wallet that Schwab was going to make a play here. But this is a pretty big deal, I would say. Thoughts on this one, guys?
- [37:53]
Liam
Yeah, they partnered with Paxos for this and they're going to be. Paxos is going to be doing sub custody as well as Schwab is going to be passing along 75 bips of trading, only offering Bitcoin and Ethereum to start. But it sounds like they want to support other assets as well. Would say props to them for only going with, you know, what Tradfine sees to be as the majors at first and really the blue chips, even though Bitcoin and Ethereum obviously aren't necessarily really comparable. But this, this was interesting to me. I thought that Schwab was going to go either the direction of zero hash, which I thought was announced earlier, or build something in house or actually E trade. But yeah, this is a little bit what we talked about earlier of the compression of traditional finance and Bitcoin and digital asset financial services kind of compressing into one. But obviously these folks are going to want to really build something in house at a later date because they're really outsourcing all of their customer assets which could be lost at any point with a single custodian. And really the understanding of how users actually really want to interact with the asset by going to some custodians and using providers from day one. So good to see just more people come into this space. But obviously kind of a B1 at this stage.
- [39:22]
Michael
Yeah, I think that's a good recap or like notion of. We've had some intimate knowledge of Schwab and they were, you know, apprehensive about this whole asset class as most of Trad 5 was but they naturally knew with new leadership they needed to step in. But to your point, they're playing like half pregnant in the sense of they're. You see assets leaving, you have the analytics so you know you need to step in. But when you don't have real conviction or confidence like a Morgan Stanley, you start to just outsource all of it. And outsourcing all of it really comes with multiple layers of risk. Whether it's disintermediation because the end, you know, financial service firm owns the client assets and ultimately that relationship to if there's any kind of hack because the reality is or any kind of risk because the reality is even if they open up Ethereum and Bitcoin, if you're a third party, your counterparty is supporting the long tele crypto assets and they have all this complexity in their wallet architecture is fundamentally different because they're thinking about the long tail. It puts everyone at risk. So I think that's the, I guess the negative or just the thing to be aware of now. The positive. Let's, let's, let's you know, bump it up a bit in the sense of like it was a very bullish week Brian highlighted. You know, I think because we're seeing so much of this with the Morgan Stanley stuff we'll talk about but we can't forget that Charles Schwab is one of the largest financial institutions on the planet earth. They manage I think over 11 and a half trillion dollars in clients capital. And I've always thought and have been talking about that there's a number of reasons where the prices stayed like pegged to this band. And one of the big ones was that traffi needs to turn on all the plumbing. And we're seeing Morgan Stanley, we're seeing Goldman, we're seeing Schwab come in. And I think that all this is long term, long term and long tail bullish for market sentiment. The knowledge of sophisticated parties that are looking at Charles Schwab getting into this, it starts to just eat away at those notion of woke. Digital assets are a fad. They're going away like some of the largest institutions taking a stake and where they're going to play is that signal that this isn't going back in the box. And then to Liam's point, they're large enough and they're sophisticated enough that I believe that a Schwab will ultimately see where the market's going and start to have to place bets which also goes kind of into the early writer's thesis of these firms will naturally have to buy a lot of these companies because they're still playing on a different kind of lane than understanding ultimately what the end client will need. The last thing I'll say is we talked about this. We'll continue to. This is really a retail driven market. It will continue to be. And retail can mean different things. It can mean somebody buying a hundred thousand, ten thousand or ten million dollars. But the point being it's individuals that are making these choices. And those individuals, as they increase in confidence and conviction and education, they will ultimately look for the best products which will drive Schwab to have to adopt them or buy them 100%.
- [42:14]
Brian
And you mentioned Morgan Stanley. Big shout out to Morgan Stanley and Amy Oldenberg who says crypto is becoming daily business across the firm. I think this is significant in the sense that what she's indicating or suggesting here is that this isn't just a money making opportunity in terms of launching their Bitcoin ETF product, signaling that they're going to build custody internally over time, even though they're outsourcing it to start. What this is really suggesting here is they're internalizing a lot of this and being really serious and thoughtful about it. She says there's an inflection point here. This is starting to become part of the daily business operations. We've really come around and so I think this is important signaling from Morgan Stanley, like the big boy in the room that recognizes this is where things are headed and they want to be a part of it, they want to capitalize on it and they're taking it seriously. And so they're going to do all the tokenization stuff, the real world assets, what have you. But I do think it's notable that they started with a spot Bitcoin etf. You know, they'll get to all these other things that they know that they can make money from as well. But where they wanted to start was where there's proven demand, there's a proven track record from what, what BlackRock has done. And so that's where they started. And then similarly, Goldman filed last week for their own version of a Bitcoin etf. It's not going to be a straight spot etf, but it'll be a, an income, a yield boosted etf. So maybe not super surprising from Goldman to do something a little bit different where they can probably charge a little bit higher fee on this, but a premium income ETF is designed to provide investors with exposure to bitcoin while generating income through option strategies rather than simply tracking the price. Thoughts on either of these. Goldman or sort of Morgan Stanley?
- [44:12]
Michael
Yeah, it feels like Morgan Stanley. We got to come up with a segment or a term for this in the sense of Morgan Stanley's looking more like a fidelity and sophistication where Goldman's looking more like Schwab. And we'll see how that, you know, plays out and how that diverges if they decide. But either way, you know, what came to mind is if I was running Morgan Stanley Fidelity, this is how you would play it. Like this is how I personally play it, knowing what we know. Because if you think about it, whatever Morgan's saying, I think they're like 6 to 8 trillion fidelities in the 10 to 20 trillion band. That migration is not going to happen. Instantly. You lose all credibility. And so the reality is you have to look at the market and take what it's given you and the market's giving you stablecoins and distribution. So Fidelity's doing fid fully expect Morgan Stanley will do something there. You're looking at market structure, owning the client relationship where it's going. So long term, if there's only 21 million and counterparty risk is at the forefront, you don't want to out or, you know, have that external from a custody perspective. And then if the market, for better or worse, is going to tokenize equities and other assets, will you want to have the infrastructure to help with that migration? And so I think it's really promising to see that they fully embrace this. They're looking across all asset classes, where the market's going, where the administration is going, and then still taking Bitcoin, which we focus on in blue chip for all market and all assets because it has the upside of getting to gold and surpassing it with still the monetization and process to build a brand around it. It's really cool to see and I think we're going to see more tradfi firms and banks. We talk to them, they get it, they see it. They're just taking their time because they have so much lindy when it comes to their brand and client relationships in assets that it's like the version of not catching a falling knife versus launching an income ETF or just outsourcing it to Paxos. They're just being more deliberate and intentional. And they're deliberate and intentional is really still fast because these ETFs just came out and they're already going full into it. So I think overarching this is Very positive from just a market perspective, because these firms compete with other firms. They're all looking at each other. And if somebody like Morgan Stanley and Fidelity has taken such a bent towards providing the right market structure and vertically integrating these services, people are going to take a second look at that and realize, well, wait, why am I just outsourcing this? And they're ultimately going have to go buy those firms or they're going to have to start to develop it in house. The hard part is if you don't have the right leadership at these firms, it's very hard to attract the right talent. And so even if you get talent, you can build the wrong things. And that's when you end up with like perpetual features, getting embedded and whatever's going on with like the poly market stuff, I think they're raising more money. But also it feels like every firm's trying to figure out the prediction market stuff, which is just like leaning more into capital destruction versus preservation, which may look good in the short term, but I don't think it's going to be the winning bet for anybody long term.
- [47:12]
Liam
100%. Yeah. Seeing that quote up on the screen, we're listening to clients needs. She said if clients want to buy Spot crypto, we'll offer Spot crypto as long as we can from a regulatory perspective. So this, they're going to offer Spot Bitcoin. It's essentially reading between the lines. But as a quick reminder, the Basel 2 requirements still require 100%. If you hold $100 in Bitcoin, you have to hold $100 in cash. And that's just not how banks operate. They want to deploy that cash and rehypothecate at least some bitcoin. Even if they put it in a segregated account like we know should actually be the end state, they still have to hold that cash there. So they're not going to necessarily do that at this point in time. I would imagine that these banks just seeing these types of statements, as well as Citi is rumored to be developing something in house, probably trying to get that rid of that requirement at the moment. But that's still something that's keeping the banks held up before offering the Spot Bitcoin products directly to their clients, not in an ETF wrapper. But until, until that happens, you're going to see, as Michael mentioned, like, why would there, why would you be working on a bitcoin product if you could actually do this at a firm where you could launch this and have it go live? So it's going to keep a lot of banks on the sidelines until this actually gets resolved.
- [48:38]
Brian
Yeah, well said. Shipping gears is a little bit here. The latest in the Kraken saga. So they were going to go public then they indicated they were going to shelve the IPO partially due to market conditions and now they're filing again at a lower valuation. Leah, maybe I'll hand this one to you. Thoughts on this? What does this mean? Any implications to take away here?
- [49:07]
Liam
They have some. I think they're, I think their CFO left recently or not 100% sure if it was them or Gemini in particular. But yeah, valuation I think they raised 800 million at a $20 billion valuation back in November around when bitcoin was close ish to when it hit its second all time high. So a lot of the momentum has just kind of come out of digital assets in general. It's not the hot thing anymore. AI has taken over bitcoin, treasury companies have lost a lot of the momentum. And this is kind of just as we talked about before. All digital asset companies are really kind of plays on that. So yeah, I mean good to see that they're still going public at this moment. They're profitable. They just bought another derivatives platform out there. But yeah, I mean there's no reason at least why I see them not going public at the moment with a fairly strong balance sheet. Yeah. Just interesting to note though that as bitcoin kind of halved and a lot of these other digital asset, the longer tail which Kraken has a lot of support for on their platform dropped like 50, 60, 70%. Their valuation's only gone down by 33%. So they're, they're prepared to weather the storm, it looks like. Based on like EBITDA and all their metrics.
- [50:34]
Michael
Yeah, I don't have a lot to add outside of. It's my understanding that at least from the sophisticated crypto market participants, the VCs, the people that are actually backing firms that have some real sustainability. Rain's a great example. These firms that are building these rails that are kind of bridging, you know, the crypto world and Tradfi that Kraken is somewhat on the come up in the sense of they brought over. It's not social capital, it's he left social capital. The guy, Arjun Sethi, they've invested and he's now running the company that he's more plugged into where this market is going. And so as we've talked about here, you know you kind of want founder led businesses in the sense of if he's sitting there, he feels a trajectory. They are. I haven't looked at their recent employee count versus Coinbase, but I'm pretty sure it's like one tenth of Coinbase's bloat. That'll be interesting to watch how they play out from a revenue perspective and also pushing the boundaries across the space. Specifically want to call it as just like identic finance. And. And what does that look like versus Coinbase? Because Coinbase is fascinating. I don't like, really pay a lot of attention to them, but they're. They've always been understood. It made me curious because Brian was there for. For a brief time. They've always just been very scattered and never had an understanding of focus. It's like the. The rich man's version of Coin. Of Gemini.
- [51:58]
Liam
Right.
- [51:58]
Michael
We've talked about Gemini and that their genesis was really the wink of eye, holding an insane amount of bitcoin, wanting to get ETFs live, I think, to park their bitcoin, really. And so they had part of that process where they needed to develop a custody solution and then it turned into Gemini. So it was always lacking, like, the trajectory of a bitcoin being money and then B, like, what do you build? And so you play that out to Coinbase. And Coinbase had this early genesis and they were really supported with their relationship with a 6D. They were. They kept them banked with SVB. But the point being is that they were kind of fluttering around and then there was that kind of, like, blessing by the admin and government around. Okay, well, Coinbase is the big boy in the room. And the ETFs, and now institutional allocators. It's my understanding, like, sophisticated participants don't go to Coinbase. It's institutional allocators that go. Because nobody gets fired for going to Coinbase. So it'll just be fascinating to see how they can hold that up on the custody side, because they're not really monetizing much of that. And then ultimately, what does it look like for the rest of their services? Especially because it's really like. I think the thing most people forget is at the end of the day, these things are monies. Like, even if they're crypto, they're still competing with monies. And you have to provide some level of financial services and client services, meaning you have to be able to talk to somebody. You can't, like, get stuck in queues and nobody respond to you and be worried about when you do withdrawals. Everybody here we work with clients and they have to withdraw assets. It's a very odd thing because they're hacked all day long in the sense of people's data's leaked and their Coinbase accounts are hacked. But then when you really want to go as a relevant or real withdrawal, they make it impossible. If not, you can't get a hold of anyone. And so it's just going to be fascinating to see as the market grows, that reputation is going to continue to grow in a negative light. And what does it look like for people and where do they monetize and how do they grow that whole business?
- [53:39]
Brian
Yeah, I mean, Coinbase is an, is in an interesting spot in the sense that if you just look at the trajectory of their business, they really over indexed on basically everything outside of Bitcoin. And so they focused on Ethereum for a long time, then they kind of pivoted to focusing more on Solana. They tried to launch an NFT exchange to compete with OpenSea that totally flopped. I think that one of the bigger indicators of what you reference in terms of being scattered is if you look at the Coinbase Ventures portfolio, they literally just invest in every single crypto project that ever existed. So they have this sort of spray and pray approach where 99% of those investments are likely to be zeros at the end of the day. And so they haven't had any real guiding light or guiding direction and they've taken these pretty large swings. You know, the NFT thing is, is the one that seems most glaring and they were actually in, in the midst of doing that when I was there in sort of 22, and it was just startling to, to see sort of the overt misallocation of capital and ultimately destruction of capital. Like I, I don't remember the exact amount of capital that they spent on that particular endeavor, but it wasn't nothing and it ended up being a total flop. And no one uses their NFT platform, no one buys NFTs generally anymore. So I think, you know, OpenSea is probably struggling as well, but it's just that sort of lack of awareness and really ultimately getting distracted from the thing that matters. And I think why I say why I started with that there is, they're in an interesting spot is because they do have this foothold in the Bitcoin ETF custody game. You know, 80% of the ETF assets are with, are with Coinbase. And so it's not like they're dead in the water in that sense, in that they, they do have a pretty strong foothold there in, you know, a solid revenue engine for just earning fees on these Bitcoin ETFs which we all expect to grow. But the, where the sort of rubber meets the road is as the Morgan Stanley's of the world say, hey, we're actually going to just know, do the custody in house. Why would we pay Coinbase to do this one? To have the reputational risk or. But also just to. Why would we be paying them for that when we could just do it ourselves? I think that'll be, that'll be the real moment that Coinbase decides do we want to keep wasting our time and energy and capital and all these other things, or do we want to just be more tightly focused on. On what actually matters, what's driving the business forward and, and how we're actually going to compete with the Morgan Stanley's of the world ultimately, ultimately over a longer time frame.
- [56:25]
Michael
Yeah, and that's where it gets really interesting because they aren't a financial institution or service firm in that sense of like relationship driven and product driven in a fundamental sense. And there's a paradox that's starting to come more into light and will definitely as the price of Bitcoin rises is it's like, I guess counter to tradfi in assets under management and the ability to generally monetize and provide that flywheel where it's kind of counter when you centralize those assets that it's like this notion of their success kind of begets risk and concerns in the market. We saw this and it's interesting because most people don't talk about it, but at that 120k mark, their total assets under management got to close to 800 billion, so close to a trillion dollars. And everyone started worrying specifically from the institutional crowd and ETFs, well, what happens if something happened to Coinbase? So there's that like I think barrier that will always exist where once you start to get to a certain band now the market will want to segregate or move those assets from there. So I don't necessarily know how they grow that into a place where the market gets comfortable with and then the other side of it is like that floating around without real vision is very harmful because if your clients or assets are there, well, you start to increase risk. The OpenSea one is a great example because still TBD on anything on NFTs, but OpenSea I think raised at like a 14 billion dollar valuation. And I don't know what their recent one is, but if they're chasing these Themes that they don't even have a fundamental grasp on. It just is a very bad signal from a leadership perspective. So yeah, it's, it's going to be fascinating to watch play out and I, I really think like the fidelities in Morgan Stanley's are going to be really well equipped and well suited if they continue down this path of really buying into where this asset class is going to take those underlying. And probably that's where Morgan Stanley is coming from. If you think about it. They're going to build custody in house and we've talked about this. The differentiation on a net net long term is, well, how many custodians are participating from a governance perspective, because if you're Morgan Stanley or Fidelity and assets start to go there and you start to layer on more financial services and you have more of these tradfi assets, well, why would you stay at Coinbase when they effectively look the same? If you go listen to podcasts, the way Coinbase asset management will say from an institutional perspective is like, we have more assets, longer time in the space, so that's why you should trust us. But that starts to like break down over time, especially when you have other firms with notable brands and larger balance sheets, larger equity value. So it's going to be fascinating to play out. We obviously think that the longer term play is that you don't necessarily have to trust the brand because there's a better governance model with the underlying, but it's going to take time to get there. And so that intermediary period is going to be interesting to see where capital flows.
- [59:13]
Brian
Those.
- [59:15]
Liam
Yeah, a lot of their prediction markets and you know, pushing people to bet on March Madness and everything like that too, I think is going to really distract and become a bigger signal and the, the bull really does start to come back and people get concerned about how much value there is on the platform through ETFs etc, at least in dollar terms, which people can conceive a lot better than how much Bitcoin they actually have.
- [59:42]
Brian
The bull never left, boys. Bull never left. All right, he's just sleeping.
- [59:47]
Liam
We're at the start of a new one.
- [59:50]
Brian
Yeah. All right, gents, anything else? Right on time here. Go check out Honorary Finance. Go to the landing page, poke around, make an account. It's free to sign up.
- [60:02]
Michael
Yeah, I think, I think only other thing to call out because we kind of hinted at it was there was big announcements last week from sophisticated participants. We'd like to think in the market you can see this trend and Liam hinted at it. It's just the notion of converging between regular assets and in bitcoin or digital assets. So tether independent of how we think about or like what their intent is, they are one of the most sophisticated from the balance sheet perspective. You look at what they've been allocating to and then they actually released a wallet that I think is really innovative and adds a lot of value specifically to people that aren't banked in emerging markets. It's one of the first times I've ever seen where they're parking tether dollars, tokenized gold and then BTC and a self custodial wallet. Now naturally you don't want to park anything in a hot wallet that you're willing to lose but for a lot of people that are holding nominal amounts it's a perfect thing especially if you don't have access to a bank account. So I think this is just kind of like further underpins a lot of what we've been discussing providing gold dollars and BTC see in a new financial experience and then the other one and really credit to Alex Leishman and the river team is you know, really understanding that where the market's going and it's going to converge is you got to unify the experience with bitcoin and then dollars. So they also are working with lead bank and brought in the ability to earn and pay bills on that cash in a unified experience right next to your bitcoin Makes complete sense if you are long BTC and you need access to dollars and you're slowly sweeping cash over or decre seeing you want that experience. And so I further expect them to be leading in that front and doing other things there and so very cool to see and I do think we'll see more of this especially just for everyone's awareness there's just been real changing that most people haven't fully appreciated yet with the new administration, the genius act, the soon to be clarity act, where the banks are now in they're willing to play but the market hasn't caught up to it. And so I think that there's a real opportune time for people that are playing in the space want to build these rails. We're obviously investing on the early writer side that just bringing in that unified experience and also better money movement. That's the thing that most people don't get is it's just truly a new design surface where the legacy firms are still going to onboard and do stablecoins but they're. They're just doing the V1, they're doing the Goldman or the Schwab effect. They still don't appreciate how the money can move, how you can bypass all the legacy wires. My best example that I like to use is Mercury, because Mercury didn't fundamentally do anything from a banking perspective. They changed the user interface, the user experience, and it was a hundred times better than anything that was business banking related. And I think that opportunity is going to come to consumers across the board. We've seen this already. There was a slash deal where they raised like over a hundred million dollars and they're doing, you know, similar stuff as far as like stablecoin movement, but the market just is is going to move with their capital and it's really easy now for them to do that by sending a wire, getting their bank account access, getting their stable coins. So it's going to be interesting to watch play out.
- [63:04]
Brian
Agreed. All right, boys.
- [63:07]
Michael
Good stuff, guys.
- [63:08]
Brian
See you next week. Thanks. Thanks 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.