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Saylor's Sell Signal, Morgan Stanley, & Coinbase Just Cracked | Joe Consorti
01:00:07
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- [00:00]
Joe Consorti
We have a lot of debt. We have an increasing amount of debt. A larger and larger percentage of that is interest expense beyond a certain level. We cannot allow our interest expense to become the largest line item on our balance sheet, as we're also raising the amount of debt that we're issuing. So as a mathematical function of that, we have to keep rates relatively low. What does that mean? More credit creation, more risk taking, and what serves as the greatest asset to absorb freshly printed money, I. E. Credit that gets created out of thin air. It's bitcoin. Right. So this is a process. It's always expanding. Global money supply is always rising. Global credit is always being created. It's just a function of how quickly it's occurring.
- [00:36]
Michael
Right.
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Joe Consorti
And if you extrapolate that out to the rest of the world, they're in a much more dire situation from a debt perspective than we are. So imagine the situation in the US cranked up to 10 or 11, particularly in places like China. So isn't it. It's an inevitability. Bitcoin is. Is destined to rise.
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Brian
What you're telling me is that music
- [00:54]
Jackson
is about to stop and we're going
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Brian
to be left holding the biggest bag
- [00:58]
Jackson
of odorous excrement ever assembled in the
- [01:01]
Joe Consorti
history of
- [01:04]
Jackson
1974-1987-9297-2000, whatever we want to call this. It's all just the same thing over and over.
- [01:12]
Joe Consorti
We can't help ourselves.
- [01:14]
Brian
I say when we sell. Hey. I say when we sell.
- [01:23]
Jackson
We are back. We are back. It's the last trade. We have our first guest on the show in quite some time, Joe Consorti. Joe, it's great to see you, head of growth at Horizon. Thanks for joining us today and thank you in advance for not letting us down. I think you're gonna do a great job on this podcast today. Excited to have you on.
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Joe Consorti
Absolutely. Jackson, Brian. Michael. Absolute pleasure and very, very honored to be kicking it off as the first guest back in a while. I appreciate that our.
- [01:51]
Michael
Our audience got tired of hearing us offer for a full hour, so we decided, you know, might as well spice
- [01:56]
Brian
it up a little.
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Jackson
Yeah, Mainly Michael, there's only so much, like, even. Even working at the company, there's only so much Michael, you can take, and I certainly feel for the audience. So it's good to have Joe back on, get some more. Get some other opinions of the show, get some certified thought leaders in the bitcoin space. So, Joe, good to see you, man. Thanks for joining us again.
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Joe Consorti
Absolutely. You know, I haven't added Thought leader to my LinkedIn yet, but I just
- [02:19]
Jackson
might, just might, just might after today. Cool, man. Well, thank you. Let's get into it. We got a, I think we'll have a tight rip here today, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on what that means for you. But I think a nice place to start would be we have some situation monitoring that needs to be done. So we're always back and forth on is there a war happening in Iran, Is there not a war happening? And I think what a lot of people tend to miss is the fact that you may notice a pattern with the rhetoric coming out from the Trump administration based on where bond yields are headed. And so I think TFTC has done a great job covering this. Luke Roman, of course, has been one of the best analysts out there. Joe, I know you cover this as well. And I bring this up in the context of just another, another post on Truth Social about kind of it is, you know, we are going to have peace or we're not going to have peace. And you kind of see these peace talks coincide with a new spike up in the 10 year, the 30 year US treasuries. And then also across the board, you're seeing sovereign, sovereign credit move up or yields move up to the upside. And so I want to talk about just that context first because it's really important. I think often people miss the fact that we're not really calling the shots. The bond market is calling the shots. So Joe, what are your thoughts on that to kick us off here?
- [03:38]
Joe Consorti
For sure, it's a really great way to kick things off because it sort of tells you the entire game in a nutshell. And what you said last was very, very true. It's not the Fed that calls the shots. What the Fed's job is to do is to set policy rates in order to try to influence the direction of the US treasury market. But ultimately rates lead the Fed. Right? Where the bond markets go, where the bond vigilantes dictate, that's what the Fed invariably does. And so what you've seen, and Lawrence Lepard has pointed this out, Simon Dixon has pointed this out, you sent over a great tweet from Luke Groman where he points out every time the 10 year yield over the last more than two months now that we've been in Iran has approached about 4 and a half percent. We have seen basically jawboning come out. Jawboning, extreme jawboning occur where talk floats of the end of the war. Right. And this is the latest example of it. Obviously the war in my mind, given what we're seeing right now is nowhere near ending. You know, it's really funny, you look at the spike that occurred before this last one. I remember late last week, people were saying, oh, the war is going to be over. Look at Trump's latest Truth Social post. He was saying that, you know, they're hours away from a peace deal being inked. And then literally like seven and a half hours later, eight hours later, a massive petroleum spot gets bombed in the uae. And so in my mind, it's really interesting to see that the 10 year, every single time it approaches this critical juncture, we see a lot of jawboning about the end of the war. It's no surprise to me. And the recent bid that we're seeing in tens and really all across the curve, I would wager that that's going to sell off once again after it's revealed that the war is in fact not close to over. But it sort of reveals the entire game here. We can go to war insofar as we can afford it. War is not something that the US treasury market particularly likes. There oftentimes is a huge sell off, as you can see here. That strengthens the dollar. That's bad for funding. And as we know, not just funding the war, but also the funding, funding the government more broadly. Right. There is a level at which it becomes untenable or very uncomfortable for the US government to fund itself. And I suppose 4.5% on the 10 year is that level. And so this is just the broader behavior to take away here, is that that's what the US Government is constrained by the reality of the interest rate situation, the fact that we have to roll over so much debt and we simply cannot do it at these rates. So I would say that's another constraint being thrown into the war as far as potentially ending the war is concerned. If we have to roll all of the tens we have outstanding at 4.5%, all of the bills, all of the notes, all of the bonds, elevated rates, I would say that's probably going to drive the government to try to end the war sooner than later.
- [06:29]
Jackson
Loyal listeners of the last trade. Before we get into this week's episode, I have a quick favor to ask of you. If you haven't already, please like and subscribe to the channel. And if you have a question or any feedback, please drop it in the comment section below and I will do my best to respond to every single one of them. Thank you for being here and enjoy this week's episode.
- [06:50]
Brian
Yeah, that's, that's all well said. It makes me think of, you know, I guess we're more than two months into this thing now, this conflict, this war, whatever you want to call it. And in the first few weeks, it was a similar dynamic, but I guess less focused on where the tenure was and more just where the price of oil was. You saw any time price of oil started to spike up, Trump would go on true social and tweet something to the effect of, we've got a peace deal coming, or we've already won. We've heard that we've already won multiple
- [07:20]
Joe Consorti
times during the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant going on Fox News and saying that this will be over in a couple of weeks.
- [07:26]
Brian
Yeah, so that's the pattern is you really can't take anything, I mean, any administration, but particularly this one, I would say anything they say at face value. And there's sort of a ton of, I don't want to call it manipulation, but just attempts to temper markets, whether it's oil, the 10 year, because this conflict is ongoing and they basically don't want things to break even, though, like you said, Joe, I think early on the estimates were 6 to 8 billion dollars a day that this would cost. And then there was the other sort of estimate that they wanted to actually quarter off, like over a trillion dollars for the entire war effort, depending on how long it would go. And so, yeah, wars cost money. And so that challenges a lot of the already pretty strained fiscal and monetary situations in this country. So they are doing anything and everything they can to quell markets at any point that things appear to potentially be breaking. And I guess, I mean, it's an open question how long they can keep this going in terms of like, just going out on true social and attempting to keep these things in check. I'm not really for sure.
- [08:36]
Joe Consorti
I mean, one thing that I will say though, to interject is that, like, this can happen for a lot longer than we expect. And markets can buy at hook, line and sinker a little longer than we expect. But the one fly in the ointment is that you can jawbone markets up, you can jawbone rates down, you cannot jawbone the price of oil down. It's just reality. So, like West Texas Intermediate, around 100 bucks right now. But if Brent keeps climbing to 1401-501601-70180, and the countries around the world keep having to drain their petroleum, petroleum reserves in order to put some downward pressure on price, things can get hairy really quickly. I'm sure we'll talk about it, but, like, we already have. 70% of farmers in the United States say that they don't have enough fertilizer for the year and they can't afford it. That's not good. Right. For the viewers at home who might not know, fertilizer is how we grow food. So that's really bad. And so, like, all of these downstream effects as a result of really high oil prices, you can't print your way out of that. You can't jawbone your way out of that. So we can, we can sort of kick the can and do this song and dance for a while until it becomes impossible to do. And the reality of $150, $200 oil, if we get there, sets in.
- [09:42]
Jackson
Yeah, yeah. I like the fact that you also clarified what fertilizer is used for, because if you're like me, you just get slop delivered to your door every day after work and you actually don't know how to make any food. I'm just kidding. But it's important, Joe, because you make the point about oil.
- [09:57]
Brian
Right.
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Jackson
And so it's really forcing the hand of the bond market as we're discussing. It's also forcing the hand of monetary policy. And what everyone expected going into this year was going to be lower rates, lower rates, more stimulus. And now you have one of the biggest inputs into just about everything climbing much higher because of this war. And so it's really challenging now with warsh coming in and actually just over a week now stepping in. You obviously have Trump wanting rates lower. He's very vocal about that. But then all the data is kind of, the data that is manipulated is still showing that inflation is higher than their target. And so we talked about it last week, which is an interesting one. And then, Michael, want to get your thoughts, but, but the trimmed mean. So looking into new ways to measure inflation that actually would justify rates cuts. So it's like, point being is it's all a mess. It's a shit show to, to use a play term. And Joe, I thought you made some really good points to start the show off, so I appreciate that for sure.
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Joe Consorti
Yeah, no, the. Oh, go ahead, Michael.
- [10:51]
Michael
No, I was gonna say I, I, I don't have much outside of there's a component here that we're not talking about that I don't think the market really knows or understands in the sense of the debt was already in an unsustainable place. The government knew that and still took the actions it took with Iran and Then I think we forget like, they're pretty sophisticated people in the government. They would know the second, third order effects of the straight of her moods being an option to be closed down and then oil as a byproduct. So I feel like there's just another layer into this and I don't necessarily know what it is. I don't think anybody does. But I think like a good example is for. It seems like three months now, some of the smartest, most sophisticated people were talking about the fertilizer shortage, the oil shortage, the price going, the unsustainable nature of sovereigns having to sell bonds to service oil needs for their own countries. What does that mean for the U.S. that's, that's effectively understood by the government, but we're still persisting in going down this path. So like, what is the plan? There's, there's just something else. I don't think they, they're unaware of it. So yeah, not a lot of answers I'm giving outside of like, I don't, I think they're aware of these things. It's just, what is the plan? I don't know.
- [12:01]
Jackson
Sounds like some Fed speak, man.
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Joe Consorti
Fed speak indeed. Yeah, no, it's really interesting and I think with Warsh coming in, you mentioned the trimmed mean Jackson. It's funny because now he's given two justifications for cutting rates. When the market is like screaming that we should not cut rates. Tens are soaring to 4.5% as we saw earlier. So growth and inflation expectations are super high. The front end of the yield curve, threes, one year, twos, all of them are, are screaming that the Fed should hike rates. If anything, Kevin Warsh is out here talking about trimmed mean inflation, which is, you know, it's a completely ridiculous metric that, that removes even more things from cpi. You have PCE and then you have trimmed mean pce, which is even more dumbed down. And basically what it does is like CPI is your standard, like urban consumer, out of pocket expenses, whatever. PCE trims that fat and then trims trimmed mean. PCE removes what it calls the noise, which means like extreme outliers. But if you wanted to accurately measure inflation, you wouldn't remove any outliers. Right? Because these are all of the things that we purchase. And so it's, it's manipulation on top of manipulation. And it's funny because while CPI has hovered around 3% for well over a year, lo and behold, the metric that Kevin Warsh chooses to say is the real inflation metric has fallen to like 2.3% and it's been falling for 12 months straight. You know, so it's, it's all one big scam. And I have a feeling, I have this really bad feeling in my gut that Warsh is going to cut rates regardless of what the data illustrates because he is politically mandated to. Which would be unfortunate.
- [13:49]
Jackson
Yeah. It is an inevitability though, to tie back in. Michael, some of the points that you made. I wanted to bring this up on the. So first of all, this is not what I wanted to bring up, but I wanted to show it here before I. We talk about what I actually want to talk about. But this is just. The Federal Reserve is starting to expand balance sheets specifically on U.S. treasury. So we don't need to go deep here, but it just is tying into the themes we have been discussing where it's like they say one thing, but they do another. The bond yields are spiking. There needs to be some buyers in the market. The Fed is there to positioning themselves. But the more important thing to touch on here from our friend Marty Bent would just be imagine waiting for a catalyst. Once you understand the fundament value prop of bitcoin, stay humble and stack sets. And this is so important. Right. Because we're trying to discern what's going on. And it's important. It's good to. It's good to have an informed take and be aware of what's happening in the world and how it's going to affect your investment positions. But it's also important to remember that a lot of what we're talking about is on the path of what we already know, where this all ends up. And so sometimes I get trapped in this. What's the next catalyst? Thank you, Marty, just for reminding me the fact that we don't really need a catalyst. We know what bitcoin is. We know that it's really positioned well for the time we find ourselves in. And it's only going to become more well positioned just given all the circumstances we find from the debt, the money, the geopolitical tensions, the political strife domestically as well. So it's like bitcoin is really well positioned as a savings technology to protect you against that.
- [15:16]
Michael
Yeah. And just step back from there like before getting to the bitcoin aspect because I think a lot of people would read that and be like, well, how did you get to bitcoin? It's the realization, and maybe this is an answer to what I said earlier, was that because the math doesn't math anymore, especially post 2020 with the amount of debt and monetary units inserted, that inflation has to consistently pick up year over year and on the margins if it's 12 or 14%. But you get this huge catalyst from a narrative perspective, meaning Iran, war, fertilizer, oil, that gives you the overhang to do what you need to do from a monetary policy perspective. I'm not saying that's why this is happening, but I do think it's important from the normie lens of where we're going is inflationary, no matter which way you slice it. And then that's how you end up in hard assets as the solution to protect your wealth.
- [16:07]
Brian
Yeah, I like Marty's tweet, because the catalyst is just ever present insanity in the fiat monetary system. And you only get to that point once you start to understand Bitcoin's fundamentals and why it solves for a lot of those things that we've seen metastasize over the past 50 years of Fiat. Right. And so he put it in very simple terms. And it's not to say it's easy for people to get there, because it's not. We know it's not. We see it with the institutions who are still coming up to speed. We see it with our friends and family who we've been talking about Bitcoin for years and they still don't understand it necessarily. So it's not to say it's an easy chasm to cross. But you're right, Jackson, in that you don't need a specific trigger necessarily. You just need to start understanding what's been going on for a long time.
- [17:00]
Jackson
Right. And that was the context I interpreted it as well, where I almost took it. For people who are already invested or already pay attention to the space, sometimes it's easy to try to discern what the catalyst is going to be. But there's really not in this case, I don't think going to be a particular catalyst to point to. It's really just going to be the culmination of these events that are taking place that are ultimately supportive for Bitcoin as a neutral monetary asset.
- [17:26]
Joe Consorti
100%. Right. Like you mentioned, Brian, I like the way you framed it. The catalysts are ever present. It's a process. We don't wait every five years for the money printer to fire and then Bitcoin has an explosion and then chops around for five years and then has an explosion. The reality, the mathematical reality facing the United States is very simple. We have a lot of debt that we have an increasing amount of debt. A larger and larger percentage of that is interest expense beyond a certain level. We cannot allow our interest expense to become the largest line item on our balance sheet as we're also raising the amount of debt that we're issuing. So as a mathematical function of that, we have to keep rates relatively low. What does that mean? More credit creation, more risk taking, and what serves as the greatest asset to absorb freshly printed money, I. E. Credit that gets created out of thin air. It's Bitcoin. Right. So this is a process. It's always expanding. Global money supply is always rising. Global credit is always being created. It's just a function of how quickly it's occurring. Right. So I really like how this is being framed. And it's one of my biggest points of contention with a lot of the bitcoin critics. They'll say, hey, well, you know, global M2 is actually going down. What do you think about that? It's like, well, you know, ultimately that can't persist. And if you extrapolate that out to the rest of the world, they're in a much more dire situation from a debt perspective than we are. So imagine the situation in the US cranked up to 10 or 11, particularly in places like China. So it's an inevitability. Bitcoin is destined to rise, and some years it will rise exponentially faster than others.
- [19:01]
Jackson
Yeah. And to your point, Joe, this is a global phenomenon. We've been talking about the US for most of the debt conversation. But the UK I mean, is another great economy to point to where there's about 3 trillion or so in national debt and interest payments on the debt are over $100 billion annually and that already exceeds the defense budget of that country as well. And so you're getting to this point where higher interest rates are just a forcing function for the debt spiral. And obviously we need lower rates. To your point on Ramp 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 a signed copy of Gradually then Suddenly by Parker Lewis. 21,000 SATs deposited into your account upon activation. Sign up in 5 minutes on rampbitcoin.com, use the code TLT and do not wait. Once these spots are claimed, the Genesis program closes for good. If I want to shift gears here, Chad, can we determine if this is a catalyst or not, we have to continue on the theme. Michael, you had a good take. I want to get to as well on Morgan Stanley launching bitcoin trading on their E trade platform. So it's about 9 million clients. And how are they competing? Well, they're competing on cheaper fees. So we've touched on the fact that Charles Schwab is also planning to launch in the first half of this year to their 12 million client base. Spot trading, custody of bitcoin, and I think the other few major digital assets, some may say, but now you have Morgan Stanley stepping in. They've also had an incredibly successful ETF launch. And it begs the question, well, why is this happening? And it's happening for a couple of different reasons. First is people want or these firms want people to stay on their platform. They want to generate revenue. They don't want people leaving and taking that activity away from the platform. And then the second piece is, well, they're doing it because they see that there is a clear trend in terms of demographics toward bitcoin, toward the digital asset space. Younger people are allocating more meaningfully to this space. And so they want to get positioned for the $80 trillion of wealth that is being passed from the boomers to younger generations over the next couple decades. And then it begs the question, well, like how do they actually compete here? And so it's really coming down to fees because everything's commoditized and there's very little differentiation. And I just point this out because we saw the same thing with the Morgan Stanley ETF launch as well, where they were just under undercutting blackrock by about half of the bips on their on the product there as well. And then you have Eric Balchunas, one of the loyal listeners of the last trade. He says Morgan Stanley is rolling crypto trading on its E trade platform for 50 bips, a trade undercutting Schwab, 25 bips. If we know, if I know Schwab, they likely won't let this stand. Others will probably undercut too. By the time the dust settles, it'll be pretty dirt cheap to create to trade crypto everywhere, just as we saw with the bitcoin ETF expense ratios prior to the launch. This is why Tradfi is no joke and crypto exchanges should be scared. So that last point, Michael, I think you have some takes on because we're going to everything being commoditized. You're going to exchanges trying to keep their base, like let's say crypto bitcoin Native Exchange is trying to keep their base and they're going to have to compete with these giants that are providing a very similar solution but they're going to be able to drastically undercut them on call. So what are your thoughts there?
- [22:27]
Michael
Yeah, I think there's, there's two before going directly to just like business strategy. I think this is something I stumbled on talking with Joe last week. I believe in Braum. There's a true aspect of the machine. It's not popular to talk about but it's something that I've been dancing around in my mind around the notion of bitcoin's been stuck or pegged between this 80-120k band and it'll move when the machine's ready for it to move and not a second before. And there's precedent for this. We've seen gold sit around its price for a very long time and part of it was stumbling on this notion of well why haven't sovereigns adopted bitcoin? And there's real reasons why when you think about IMF and reliance on dollars and swap line and you don't want to poke the bear. We saw El Salvador, what happened there. We've even seen other countries be super obscure or opaque with their stacking like you know, Bhutan, UAE's using mining as their source versus swapping dollars. So point being is that I think there's been this strategy going back to the ETF of this was going to get integrated into the financial system and a lot of the incumbents, the Morgan Stanley's, the fidelities of the Schwab needed to turn all these, all this plumbing on. They went from the internal mechanism and stigma, this is rat poison square to now oh we gotta like go and compete against each other in the market to onboard. And so as these firms come into place for liquidity we'll naturally see that narrative go. Inflation will run and that's when the price of bitcoin will go. Why I'm bringing all of that up is because the 6040 is pervasive. And I think that when you look at like traditional crossing the chasm as you go in you, you're going into pragmatist buyers. Pragmatist buyers want to buy out of their traditional brokerage or portfolio. They don't want to go somewhere else else. So that is the version of Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity coming in. Now the thing that being and having worked in the space and building a space for a while now started to dawn on me that the genius act and clarity post that you were really going to have to compete because pre those acts being in place, none of these firms were offering any of these services. So it made complete sense. If you were an early adopter, it wasn't a foreign, you know, for an action to send the wire, figure out how to buy the bitcoin, figure out how to take it into cold storage. That's what an early adopter had to do. But ultimately a lot of that is going to be commoditized and obfuscated from the boomer, the retail market to go buy here. And these firms have so much lock in when you think about your loans, your mortgage, your credit cards, your bank account, your equities, that it's the rational user behavior just to stay within that portfolio, especially if they're undercutting or doing comparable fees, Even if they're 10 bips more expensive than pick your favorite stacking sats exchange. Most net new buyers are going to go there and also probably existing buyers. If that experience ties in all your traditional life. Think about cross collateralization for a mortgage, like if you can keep those bitcoin and then also cross collateralize. So I think this was easily forecasted and it was part of like the big reason for us to start to look more like a traditional brokerage and offer in dollar accounts, earn rewards and then really have that differentiation with multi institution. Because I think the thing that the market's going to get lulled to sleep at is if the product's free, you are the product in the sense that if custody's free, they're telling you it's not really worth much. This was a big thing from the market investors, others. It's like custody shouldn't cost anything in bitcoin. And all that told me was they were very unsophisticated because ultimately the delta between you holding any bitcoin or no Bitcoin is literally how you custody it. So if you have this room to go from zero to ten thousand or ten thousand to $100,000 asset or a hundred thousand to a million, and the difference in you having it or not is literally how you custody. That's what we've seen from FTX, Celsius, BlockFi hardware devices, then the market will pay for that on a long enough time horizon if they feel confident in the underlying custody. And so it's going to be an interesting to see how this plays out because I think the existing incumbents are going to take a lot of market share because their custody looks exactly the same as everyone else's. And that's going to be the net differentiator on a long enough time horizon. Because unless everyone thinks that North Korea is going to stop state sanctions, hacking attempts and physical bad actors, and there's not going to be any third party, you know, hacks with AI, then there's going to be realization that you need to change on the custody side.
- [26:51]
Joe Consorti
Very, very well said. Right. We're entering into an era where, you know, when you start to see these shops competing on fees, that's how. When, you know, that's how, you know, bitcoin has sort of won out and it's sort of moved into the mainstream at long last. And this was an announcement that I was not expecting to be very clear. Like I thought Morgan Stanley, with their etf, they would stop there and then maybe they would launch spot bitcoin trading a year from now after seeing how successful it was. But the fact that this was, and again, this is sort of skewed data because they only have nine ETF launches ever or 11. But the fact that it was their best ETF launch in history drove them to do this much sooner than later. So for me, it's another feather in the gap of bitcoin. It's another piece of the pipe that has been laid for invariably when the next bitcoin bull market comes, the infrastructure will be down for people of all stripes, whatever types of bitcoin they want to buy, whether they want to buy the etf, spot, bitcoin, et cetera.
- [27:51]
Brian
Yeah.
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Michael
One thing just to add is it wasn't necessarily surprising from market forces, but also, at least in my perspective, if you looked, I think right when the ETF launched, Morgan Stanley had real interesting research or like marketing that was explaining the difference between a spot allocation and then an etf. And the way I perceived that was that they, along with other private wealth firms, understand that they have sophisticated clients and they understand they want SMAs and they want other assurances with the underlying when they go get significant exposure. So it was the rational behavior if they're really in this, which I think Morgan Stanley and Fidelity in my view are the most sophisticated in that they're building out their own custody. Fidelity has their own. Morgan Stanley is signaled that they're building out custody for themselves and then that you would offer different kinds of products and exposures for people that just want to buy a security type exposure in an ETF or if you want spot. And so they kind of signaled that they understand where the market's going to go. And I think the opposite is kind of like Schwab because Schwab really flipped on a dime and also they kind of outsourced everything to Paxos. And so it'll be interesting to see how that plays long term because I think Morgan Stanley looks at this as there's a lot of room for the price to appreciate. And not that it's a loss leader, but if they can get their brand associated with Bitcoin and get more of that Bitcoin within their like domain, they can monetize that as the price appreciates in the future versus somebody like Schwab offering transactional like exposure. If they don't get known for doing best in class, those assets are going to leave to somebody like Fidelity or Morgan Stanley.
- [29:25]
Brian
Yeah, I agree with all that. I think the a couple things to just like pull out from there is like the order of operations, Joe, to your point, and the speed at which a Morgan Stanley is going about this is I think an important signal in terms of, okay, let's do the ETF, let's compete head to head with BlackRock, but at the same time we know people are going to want spot and let's also build out custody in the background or at least signal that we're going to do that. And that's all come together like relatively quickly. Like this is we are beyond sort of the stage of the institutions dipping their toe. Like this is playing to win, playing for keeps, playing across different verticals and different vectors of the asset class in pretty short order. So I think that that's super important. Then Mike, to your point on sort of the longer term signal and why they would be okay with undercutting fees, potentially having these products or services being loss leaders, at least in the interim. I think you're exactly right. It actually tells you they're bullish on the asset, not just making fees from it. It tells you that they think bitcoin goes up over time and you want to get closest to the asset. You want to have clients that have material exposure to this thing so that as it monetizes, as it grows, you can continue to monetize your client's assets as the bitcoin appreciates. So I think that is also a significant tell and that they're just bullish on the asset. It's not that they're just. Because I think early on with ETFs, it was like, you know, I think there was some narrative of like, well, blackrock's just doing this because they can make fees. It's like this is a Little bit different. Like, if they're going to just undercut on fees, then they're not just doing it for fees, they're doing it to be close to the asset and watch this thing monetize and, you know, earn revenue from it over time, over the long term.
- [31:11]
Jackson
Yeah, I think those are great points. The main thing that sticks out to me is sometimes you hear people in the comment section or just generally online, you hear people say, well, of course, course these firms are going to launch products. They just want to make money from it. They don't really have any dog in the fight. But I think Brian and Michael, you guys made some great points just on the fact that these. Yes, that's true. They want to make money from it, of course. I mean, that's good business. But there's also, if you look more into the details on how they're positioning themselves, they really do expect Bitcoin to succeed long term. Now, if we can shift gears here, because, again, we have to move through a number of topics fairly quickly, I want to touch on what happened with Coinbase this week. Coinbase is relevant, of course, because they're the largest custodian. They custody, I think, over 2 million Bitcoin. So over 10% of the terminal 21 million supply. Over 10%. If you account for Bitcoin, that's been permanently lost, like 3 to 4 ish million. And look, when we talk about commoditization in this industry, we're pretty much talking about who can win on fees and we're talking about who has the best Coinbase wrapper. Outside of a few major players, virtually everyone is using Coinbase and this is problematic for a number of reasons. We don't need to get into today, but the tweet I have up in front of me is Brian Armstrong followed suit from a few other notable CEOs in recent months and shared the email that he sent to his team where he laid off 14% of the workforce. Now, this actually went against the kind of the thesis that I have where I think longer term that AI cited layoffs are actually the new form of financial engineering and stock buybacks because Coinbase went down yesterday. But I think it had partly a couple things to point out here. Partly the first part about where he says, why now? Is he didn't really have confidence in this message about just the direction of the industry. So he's talking about, oh, well, oh, poor me. We're in a bear market and we're still doing well. We've weathered these storms, but the market's not great, essentially, is the first point he makes. He also. We could talk about some of the things he mentions. Crypto is on the next wave of adoption with stablecoins. Okay, that's all right. Prediction markets. Okay, I don't know about that one. Tokenization. Yeah, I think there's some merit there in terms of at least making money in terms of providing Rails. So this is a note that he shared. You can check it out online if you'd like. And then he also cites, of course, AI. Just a few notable things here. AI is changing work, getting rid of kind of like the managerial class. Everyone needs to be using this stuff. AI, native pods, like building out teams, kind of around agent swarms where people can manage all these different areas of the business. And then I think one thing that was kind of humorous, if I can find it, was essentially some people were making comments about how Coinbase, largest custodian, manages security, et cetera, et cetera. And you have non technical teams who are now shipping production code and many of their workflows are being automated. I mean, I thought that was funny jab that some people made online, but. Gentlemen, what do you guys think of this news coming out of Coinbase this week? Thoughts?
- [34:16]
Michael
Go ahead.
- [34:17]
Joe Consorti
I think the most ironic thing, right, do we all remember a couple of months ago when for whatever reason, Coinbase bought like a $100 million NFT from Kobe on crypto Twitter to start his podcast again. So I mean, how many salaries is that for Coinbase's employees? Like they could have easily reduced, they could have not reduced headcount by an additional 5 or 6% with that alone. So I mean, I think it's, it's, to me, in my mind, it's, it's sort of scapegoating, right? Like we know broadly crypto, quote unquote, non bitcoin, you know, assets apart from stablecoins are dying. They're largely dying on the vine now that people can gamble the old fashioned way by downloading polymarket on their phone and betting on the weather. What's the point of trying to 100x your money on meme coins, right?
- [35:05]
Brian
So.
- [35:06]
Joe Consorti
So Coinbase is having a really difficult time finding its identity and value proposition in a world where you can just gamble anywhere. You don't need to do it with crypto. And so that's why you're seeing them introduce other things like stock trading, prediction markets, et cetera. It's sort of, you know, this platform's attempt at gasping for air and becoming relevant in a world where Non bitcoin crypto is sort of dying. So I think here it's a scapegoat with Block. A couple of weeks ago I think it was more legitimate. But I think either way, both of these companies are probably going to find that this isn't the most optimal way of leveraging AI within your company. And I'm curious to hear Michael's thoughts. In my mind, you know, you can make the individual workers more productive, but ultimately bringing on new hires is still something that you need to do. I think after an initial culling, you know, admit it, the initial culling may make some sense, but rather than a loss to headcount, I think if anything because it's such a productivity boon, you would want to hire more people, particularly more people who are capable with AI. But. But yeah, I'll pass it to you, Michael. Cause I'm curious to hear your take as someone who actually runs a company.
- [36:13]
Michael
Yeah, I think aside from like work changing, it's funny cause he was at Airbnb and there was actually a fantastic pod that came out two days ago from Brian Chesky talking about the nature of work changing and inefficiencies. I think we all know that's there and this is probably a scapegoat. I think what's more alarming that doesn't get discussed enough is he's not really that impressive of a guy. Like I didn't read that. But that doesn't surprise me that he said, you know, just from an optics perspective, people that are non technical shipping code. Because I saw some clips a few months ago where he was referencing, you know, very like in an aloof way, like somebody brought up stablecoins. He's like that's a dumb idea. And he's like lucky for me they didn't listen to me and like their stablecoin exposure. Like even if that's true, it's probably not like the smarter. You can like tactfully say it better. But why I'm bringing this up is because to what you and Jackson talked about, about, I think like the thing that the market really misses and what we're sticking our neck out. And I think firms that will win long term. River's another example is bitcoin is just money. It's the best form of money we've ever seen and it's a form of money we think that a large percentage of the market will adopt. And if you come at it from that lens, then you fundamentally treat it from every level in a different way from a business perspective. And that's the thing I think crypto forgets and sometimes on the bitcoin side, that if it's money, money requires financial services, and financial services are relationship driven. So you have to be there and present. And then they're somewhat localized. And so the notion to be an everything company and service everything is just a recipe for not only, I don't want to say recipe for not being successful, but potentially disaster, because your attack surface is so broad and you see this kind of in the market and it should, it should scare people when it comes to these large institutions that are leaving their assets with Coinbase. Because if you think about it, Coinbase has this like, large position in bitcoin from custody, but it's nobody with their own material wealth there. It's my understanding anecdotally, and also you can see this where it's not somebody with a thousand Bitcoin that goes to Coinbase. It's institutions that are sitting on thousands, hundreds of thousands of millions of people's bitcoin in very small, immaterial sizes. And they're all being put at Coinbase because that's what the administration, that's what the regulatory apparatus, that's what the SEC has deemed as, like, the place to go. So it's this really counter, like, paradox where you have this firm that's not solely focused on bitcoin. And you can see this empirically from like their balance sheet and how much bitcoin had been stacking, like their products and services, what they offer around it, how much they talk about it. I think there was a lot of memes on Twitter talking about, like, I got laid off from. I don't know how true. I think somebody was actually true. And then everyone else. But memes off, which was they were working on bitcoin and then they came out and say, I was a guy that was supposed to be working on bitcoin and we never got any burn or whatever. Yeah.
- [39:02]
Joe Consorti
Or like, I was a guy that worked at tsa. I just got fired. I was the guy responsible for making everyone take their shoes off or something.
- [39:07]
Michael
Yeah. And so it's just this notion that there's a lot of anecdotes out there. There's no focus on bitcoin. You see this via the product services and marketing. And then you have them holding all this bitcoin, which just give a lot of people a pause because everyone comes out and says, well, it's Coinbase, like, of course, like, what do you. What do you mean? Their permissions are the best. And all of it. And I just don't. I just think that's the most, like, interesting part and also potentially scary part.
- [39:33]
Brian
Yeah, you guys both hit on, on something there, which I think is very true. And it's, it's like kind of a microcosm for the entire crypto space over the past decade. And, and Coinbase is like the poster child for it of, like, if you're everything to everyone, like, you're kind of nothing. And I think there's a few areas that you could look at within Coinbase's business over the years that would point exactly to that. Like, if you look at Coinbase Ventures, so their venture arm, they've basically invested in every single crypto project that's ever existed, more or less. And so that sort of spray and pray we need to be involved in everything just shows you really don't have a grasp on where the value is going to accrue over the long term. Obviously, they should have been more focused on bitcoin over the past decade. They were focused on stablecoins, but I think that was kind of like luck as a result of being focused outside of bitcoin and seeing stablecoins proliferate around, around bitcoin. And then the other thing I was going to note was, like, Jackson, the AI layoffs being the new stock buyback, I still think that that will work, but I do think it's going to be case by case. And I think the market is naturally getting better at discerning who's doing it in a legit way or not. And I think one of the reasons that you could point to why the market perceived this as not legit in terms of that narrative and that story was that Coinbase fired 20% of their staff in 2022. So, like, they've done this before where they fire a ton of people and then they just over hire again and then they fire a ton of people. So, like, who's to say they're not just going to over hire again? Or at least like, you know, you could just look at the AI sort of excuse as the scapegoat because, like, you guys have done this before where you just are. Clearly you don't have a real intentional focus around sort of the ethos or the vision of the business. You say you, you're democratizing finance, but now you're focused on prediction markets and adding stocks. It's like, you know, it's just. There's a lot of incongruencies with their message, their story, and I think so I Think that's kind of why the, you know, the market's not buying it in terms of this explanation.
- [41:44]
Michael
And just one thing to add to that. We truly are in unchartered territory. When you think about there's like a confluence of things happening. One is you have this asset that is monetizing in real time. We've never seen it at these prices for persist like a long, long enough time and we're. If we're all bullish here, we think we're going into six figures and beyond. You have the notion of I believe it's 5% of GDP for North Korea and state sanctioned hackers that's only going to increase, that's going to increase across other sovereigns. Meaning that where most of the hacking from sovereigns, specifically North Korea is like embedding themselves into organizations via social engineering. Because as the honeypot grows the ROI you could take longer. We saw this with BYBIT and others. And then the biggest one that nobody's talking about is with the proliferation of AI and all these tools that it gets a lot easier to effectively manipulate and potentially hack anything. So you have all those things happening. You have this native digital asset that's six figures and beyond and then you have the central honey pot that's increasingly non focused. It just doesn't feel good for like whether it's them or somebody else. So everyone just assumes that this whole notion of custody's figure out and we're just going to get slapped in the face with it. And this is that example because Brian hit on a perfect point. It's like everyone in this space knows that the market gets real frothy and then you start to hire a bunch of people and it's okay, like fool me once before, me twice is a different story. Because those layoffs in 2022, almost everyone did because the market took off. But then you're starting to see that in the bitcoin space and in the crypto space again because the market took off, went into six figures and it did this retrain race and now you just sit there with all this headcount, your revenues decreased and you're wondering what the hell to do. Which I think this is what this was mostly about.
- [43:27]
Brian
Yeah. The only other thing I'll mention which relates to our previous topic was like the reaction to the stock this week could have just been that Morgan Stanley is undercutting fees on trading. That could have been related to it as well. There's real competition now in the exchange and trade arena.
- [43:46]
Jackson
Yeah, well no one will have to wonder if On Ramp does layoffs. Because if you just don't see me on the podcast at some point, you'll know I'm the first to go. So there's no or.
- [43:55]
Michael
That's when. AGI. AGI. We have Mythos or whatever, because we'll just have you still showing up for the pod. But you won't.
- [44:03]
Joe Consorti
I don't.
- [44:03]
Jackson
I don't consent to that. Let's just.
- [44:05]
Joe Consorti
They'll buy you as intellectual property and then your AI avatar costs one half of what you do. Jackson, we're so sorry.
- [44:12]
Jackson
Yeah, I know, Joe. I'm expecting it.
- [44:14]
Michael
So that's the real. It's the real 3D version of having Jackson every week is. So we get enough data to train the bot so we can effectively.
- [44:24]
Brian
I think we're close.
- [44:25]
Michael
We're close.
- [44:26]
Jackson
How many more episodes? Just so I'm aware. All right, so let's roll through a couple things here. Whether you've been in Bitcoin for 10 months or 10 years, managing your Bitcoin wealth has been a fragmented experience. 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. 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 onramp bitcoin.com and use the code TLT to lock in one year free of multi institution custody and our highest earn rate. I'm just going to throw some shit at the wall and then you guys can tell me what you want to talk about. So. So here's one. Brian, you mentioned layoffs, right, With Coinbase and. Well, are they going to do a next cycle?
- [45:37]
Brian
Maybe.
- [45:38]
Jackson
There's no next cycle for Coinbase because all of their crypto casino traffic is going to Poly Market, where you have 67% of poly market profits going to just 0.1% of accounts. While most traders are in the red, most Kalshi users are also losing money. So, yeah, I mean, this is something we've talked quite a bit about about. Gambling is one of the fastest growing financial sectors there are and a lot of people want to prescribe different reasons as to why that is, I would generally just say it's because there's a lot of societal despair. Younger people don't feel like they can get ahead. And this is kind of the new and exciting shiny way to gamble on whatever you'd want. So I'm very bullish on Bitcoin in the context of being very bearish on crypto because a lot of what you saw in 2020, 21, even as far back as 2017, was just essentially gambling on shitcoins. And a lot of people are down 99% on those bags and they're utterly devastated. But the behavior hasn't changed. And so a lot of that behavior has ended up on these prediction market platforms and probably it's going to get worse. I mean, I don't see why these prediction markets don't continue to explode to the upside in terms of popularity, unless for some reason it's regulation related. But this is one thing that caught my attention. And then a few other things. We could go tie this back into AI as well. There's a good amount of information here, but this is from tftc. They're just sharing a, a chart here with some context. Just about Goldman, Goldman Sachs saying 95 of enterprises are getting zero return on 30 to $40 billion in generative AI spending. And so I think this ties back to the last topic on Coinbase because AI is a great scapegoat for layoffs. I do think that there's a lot of legitimacy there as well. We feel this here at Onramp for people who are using AI on a daily basis as like, you know, as part of a consumer, let's say the consumer agents, it's providing a ton of value. But I think you cannot just as a company, like a large company, Goldman and the companies that they're referencing are spending all this money on AI, but it doesn't mean that you actually know how to use any of these tools. And so there's a lot of inefficiency that's still being worked out here. And then this chart is interesting as well. Well, where you can just kind of see real tokenomics.
- [47:51]
Brian
Right?
- [47:51]
Jackson
Remember tokenomics from shitcoins? Real tokenomics is when we're talking about token usage for these different platforms. And so you can get a sense here where consumer agent workloads could dramatically increase token consumption, leading to 10x token consumption by 2030. I mean we're all using this every day. Joe, I imagine you are as well. And man, I can't get enough tokens. I'm trying to find a token dealer can hook me up there. And the last piece here, I just, I thought this is kind of a funny way to put it. Jamie diamond reveals that he had his first experience with Claude this past weekend. I mean, without context, that could mean a couple of different.
- [48:27]
Joe Consorti
I don't know why, but it's. Calling it an experience sounds dirty.
- [48:30]
Jackson
It certainly does. So, gentlemen, I'm gonna throw a couple things out there. What do you guys want to riff on?
- [48:36]
Brian
Well, I also found this funny. I will shout out polymarket, they've got a pretty good Twitter account. They put out some good tweets here and there. I guess back to the prediction market deal. Like that data. That data has been consistent ever since these things really started to crop up years ago in that they're basically worse than like walking into a casino in terms of your expected value as someone participating in it. Um, and so I think that's why it's particularly pervasive and, and somewhat nefarious in the sense that like people, people know going into a casino, like walking on the casino floor, like, you know, you're gambling, you know, you probably aren't going to win. But it's fun. There's an element to it that people enjoy with prediction markets. Like you are, you're tapping into and taking advantage of someone's like, perceived received knowledge on something. And like the reality is most people have no idea what's going to happen. And so yeah, most people lose on these things. Side note, like I did see some other data that was related to this that basically like, because people are, you know, people have all these like trading bots that they build with AI to trade on polymarket and some of those actually, you know, can do well. And I think that's probably where some of the actual, actual winnings are, are sort of coalescing around. But one of the, the data points, I forget the exact numbers but it was like if you just bet no on, on anything like across the board, like you're better, you're better off because like nothing ever have the natural incentive to think something's going to happen. They think they know something and it's like, oh yeah, that's going to happen by X date or whatever. And like if you just orient to like nothing ever happens, you end up doing better than most.
- [50:25]
Michael
Yeah, there was another stat from like, I think it was political, politically related bets that were marked at 25% likelihood. 50% of the time it won. Right. So theoretically should be 25% of the time and 50% of those. But just to spice it up before jokes, I'm sure he has a couple thoughts on all that is over. Under what you guys think on that 65% in people in the. The red on DATs.
- [50:53]
Joe Consorti
Goodness gracious. Probably well over, I'd say because you also.
- [50:56]
Michael
It.
- [50:57]
Joe Consorti
Yeah, you also have to lump in the. Gosh, you also have to lump in all the crypto ones. We forget about that. Right?
- [51:02]
Michael
We'll just do a bitcoin ones.
- [51:03]
Joe Consorti
It's a bitcoin show, the bitcoin ones easily. Yeah, easy.
- [51:06]
Michael
Over. Right. So that's as bad as what we just talked about. The DAT has people and the insiders at 0.1% but either way I digress.
- [51:15]
Joe Consorti
No, you're right. And I mean like with Polymarket specifically, it's so nefarious and I don't hate many things. Right. As a Christian, we're not called to hate, but I absolutely hate gambling. I despise gambling and the fact that it's packaged in the way that it is. This is so disgusting and nefarious like you have. It's just the latest in a long line of exit liquidity schemes. Right. The crypto people are all jumping over to prediction markets and for very good reason, because everybody knows that crypto is a scam. You look at the reactions to Coinbase's super bowl commercial. Everyone was screaming at their television when the Coinbase logo came up. For good reason. You either know someone or you yourself lost a ton of money on something that you bought on their platform. With Polymarket, with Kalshi, what have you. Gan is a really great idea and in some sense is a very cool idea because you can have real time pricing for anything is unfortunately being utilized to gamble on sports.
- [52:10]
Michael
Right.
- [52:11]
Joe Consorti
It's literally just another version of a sports book. And like you said, Brian, I think you bring up a really good point. When you're in the casino, you know you're gambling, you know you're going to lose money. When you're in Poly market, you think you're smart, you think you have an edge, you think you're going to make a ton of money. And that addictive feedback loop is going to send so many people into extreme disorders, Bear. And it's just devastating to see. The odds don't surprise me. Honestly. I thought it would be higher than that. I thought it would be 70, 75 or 80% of people, but it's no wonder it's a casino.
- [52:40]
Michael
Yeah, the, the, the speculative markets, the poly markets are, are interesting because like even before Bitcoin I was always interested in, in technology and so I'm always fascinated. That's where the stable coin and like crypto, when you see the defi stuff you're like oh, I can see how this could eventually end up on Bitcoin. Bitcoin. To your point Joe, like the poly market stuff, it's never been interesting to see the nyse, the, the valuations because you just know that A, the house is always going to win but B, like I personally, to your point, it's like I hate losing money more than I like winning it and so I've just never been interested in gambling because you don't feel like you're in control and yeah, it's just, it's, it's a masked within a smartphone with a click of a button for anybody to participate and feel like they're a genius under the guise of well this is a free market or it's providing education for the market. Going back to the earlier part of the conversation, there's another angle which I saw and we talked a little bit with Matt o' Dell about. It's like, I don't know, there's an angle here of the, the, the inertia or the momentum with it because these could have always existed and they like really picked up steam the past 12 to 24 months and now there's a lot of political kind of infighting with like the gambling, the like sports books in the states that allowed for it and now they're, it's like a roundabout way to get into these different platforms, platforms that I don't know what the end game for it is, but you could just feel that there's something else at play because there's an insane, I mean you feel like every three to nine months there's another large capital raise amount of capital going into these firms and a lot of that is for marketing expenses. When you think about Uber, Lyft, those wars were around subsidizing the cost to bring it. So when you market and you put this on every application, every arena, every commercial, you're going to pull as much of the addressable market as you can into to that.
- [54:24]
Joe Consorti
Yeah, it's devastating to see. Except, you know, with Uber and Lyft they were competing for customers in such a way where the marketing tactics were guerrilla marketing and they were trying to undercut one another, but it was to provide a net value to the consumer. Whereas this time you're seeing that exact same tactic but played out in a value extraction game.
- [54:42]
Jackson
Yeah, it's very true. I am certainly on board and agree with your guys sentiment about it. We only have a few more minutes. We didn't talk about Michael Seller. Apparently there's something going on there. Brian, I'm gonna, I'm gonna let you decide. Are we talking about that or are we not? Cause I actually am curious.
- [55:06]
Brian
I want to get Joe's thoughts on it. The earnings call for MSTR last night and I think there was some signaling of this perhaps on the last earnings call as well, like basically priming people for the notion that at some point Saylor may sell some bitcoin. Now I think the way it's being posited or framed is like these are non emergency reasons. So it could make sense in some way, shape or form. I guess what I kind of take issue with is like this is a guy who said like sell your kidney before you sell your bitcoin. And it does cut against the narrative that he has built the entire business on. And so whether it's, it's non emergency or not and he ends up buying more bitcoin a week later. It's kind of beside the point to me in the sense that the only reason he's doing this is because now he has these fiat dividend obligations. And so a few months ago, six months ago, he didn't think he needed to do this. So he wasn't saying that he would sell bitcoin, he was saying never sell you bitcoin. So the fact that he's now saying this tells me that it's not all going as he thought it would six months ago ago. Is there any, I guess curious your thoughts on any of that?
- [56:16]
Joe Consorti
For sure, yeah. I think people are taking it a little bit out of context. Michael and I have different opinions as far as stretch is concerned and strategies, strategy if you will. We'll see how this plays out over the next several years. Right. I think the quote itself was taken out of context because the first half of the quote was I just pulled it up, we'll probably sell some bitcoin to fund the dividend, just to inoculate the market, just to send the message that we he did it. So in my mind basically he's saying just to your point Brian, that like they're not forced to sell their bitcoin, but they would do it just to prove that they could do it without one tanking the bitcoin price and two, showcasing to the market that hey, you know, in the event that we reach a point where we decide to begin selling bitcoin, it won't be the first time. So in my mind, it's a way to reduce future panic in the event they do begin selling their bitcoin. Because in my mind, the one of the more efficient ways to. To fund the stretch dividend is to incrementally sell bitcoin over time.
- [57:17]
Michael
Right.
- [57:17]
Joe Consorti
If you think about it this way, if bitcoin is doing 20, 25, 30% CAGR and STRC remains around 11%, you don't need to sell all of your bitcoin, just a chunk of it. And in my mind, that would do so much to remove all of the Ponzi accusations. The summary for me is that I think a lot of folks are taken out of context, and it's basically him getting out ahead and trying to dispel one the biggest attractions against STRC and the strategy complex more broadly, which is that the only way they can fund the dividend is through issuing new shares.
- [57:50]
Michael
It's like a form of forward guidance,
- [57:54]
Joe Consorti
in a way, I suppose, for the bitcoin central bank that people are calling it.
- [57:57]
Michael
Yeah, yeah. Very few, I guess.
- [57:58]
Brian
Yeah. I mean, I hear your points. I guess it just. I don't understand why he needs to prove, like, we. He can sell the bitcoin. Like, we know he can sell bitcoin. He can buy bitcoin. He can sell bitcoin. Like, I don't think he needs to prove it to the market. I think maybe he's. The takeaway to me is like, he's priming investors for, like, he might do it in the future, and he's couching it in, like, this. This terminology that, like, oh, it's like Elon saying he needed to test liquidity. It's like, well, okay, like, we know bitcoin's pretty damn liquid.
- [58:30]
Joe Consorti
I think it's more so from the perspective of proving to the market that he can do it without, like, tanking strategy stock or like, like you said, Michael, sort of setting the expectation for the. The future if he does. We'll see. It'll certainly be interesting to see how the market reacts if that happens.
- [58:45]
Michael
Love it.
- [58:47]
Jackson
Man. We didn't even get to some of the things I wanted to. But that's all right, Joe. It was a pleasure. I know we got to be respectful of your time. We also have a hard stop as well. Where do you want people to get in touch with you if there's anything they want to follow up on?
- [59:00]
Michael
For sure.
- [59:01]
Joe Consorti
Well, again, thanks, guys so much for having me. This is one of my favorite pods in the bitcoin space. Lots of signals, so keep it up. And there are plenty of Wednesdays for the rest of the year, so happy to always come back on if it's relevant. If you're watching this on YouTube, guys, just go to the top bar up there. Search up Joe Consorti and subscribe to the channel for more of these thoughts and analysis if you found it valuable. If you're watching on Extra, search Joe Consorti, follow that account. And if you want to convert some of your idle home equity to Bitcoin, you can go to joinhorizon.com and schedule a consultation with yours truly.
- [59:30]
Michael
Love it Joe.
- [59:31]
Jackson
Great show.
- [59:31]
Michael
We'll take you up on that offer. We'll definitely have you back before the
- [59:34]
Brian
end of the year.
- [59:34]
Joe Consorti
Awesome. Sounds like a plan playing guys.
- [59:36]
Jackson
Thanks man.
- [59:37]
Brian
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 from you. Visit onrampbitcoin. Com Contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.