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- [00:01]
Michael
And we've been saying it for like over a year is that stablecoins are the most bullish thing to happen to bitcoin. And David Marcus called it his like realization. He referenced that it was straight cash app and what they were doing with like Solana in the background and on the stablecoin front. But I just expect more and more people to recognize this, that they're not. They're. They're just rails and they're better rails to get liquidity into Bitcoin, really that's all it is. And as that starts to proliferate and people understand inflation and then you have this other asset and the tooling gets better and the amount of flows it's going to bring is just going to be insane. They'll be looked at so obvious in hindsight. This dawned on me like a year ago when I just. It was more left barbell of like tether and its liquidity are, are directly correlated with amount of btc, the amount of tether's printed amount of bitcoin. And it's not because it's a Ponzi, it's amount of dollars coming into the crypto ecosystem flow to BTC over time. And so think about that as like, you know, on a degree of 1 to 100, that's a 2. And this is what we're talking about, literally 100. It's like the whole world's becoming digitized and dollars become digitized and they're incentiviz digitized. And that's how you end up in this world where bitcoin's just going to completely rip.
- [01:09]
Brian
It all comes down to computers communicating
- [01:13]
Michael
the information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold.
- [01:23]
Liam
Is it still rat poison?
- [01:24]
Michael
Probably rat poison squared.
- [01:26]
Liam
We need to get into the world of.
- [01:28]
Brian
Okay. This is actually foundational technology.
- [01:32]
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
- [01:45]
Liam
of the major forces for reducing the roll of gun.
- [01:50]
Michael
The one thing that's missing that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash.
- [01:58]
Liam
Alrighty, gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Final settlement. Today is May 4, 10:36am Eastern Standard Time. Big week, big show, big week last week, maybe a big week this week. Lots to get into. Gentlemen, how are we doing? Good morning.
- [02:17]
Michael
Doing good. It was a. It was a weird or interesting week because there was like a lot of the bitcoin announcements because of the conference but then I guess Stripe just decided we're so small that it's not even on their radar. Stripe had their announcements that were just running in parallel with a lot of their agentix stuff. And then I think some other things came out. It just felt like there was a bunch of updates in news across the industry.
- [02:39]
Brian
Biggest week in a while. And bitcoin's pumping a little bit going into it too.
- [02:45]
Liam
Yeah, we were kissing, tickling 80k last night, which felt pretty good. I think we're back under it as we speak right now, but that's okay. But let's start, I think, with perhaps the biggest news, I guess this was Friday into the weekend, that we have some clarity finally, perhaps on the Clarity Act. So it seems that there has been a negotiation or compromise reached. And this is kind of what we've talked about for what feels like a year now in terms of like, this is probably going to be the end state of what this looked like, allowing the banks to sort of save face in the sense that they feel like they, they won this debate or negotiation. But on a sort of practical, realistic level, I think this is a huge win for crypto. And I think maybe that could be partially explaining some of the price bump into last night. But basically what has been agreed upon, it seems, is that there will be a sort of ban on passive yield. So if stablecoins are just sitting in an account doing nothing, that's where this sort of proverbial yield ban will apply. But it basically allows for what seems like a pretty open and broad interpretation of activity based rewards. And so if I just pull up polymarket here, you can see that the Clarity act being signed in 2026 sort of spiked over the weekend to as high as 70%. Now it's sitting around 62%. And you know, this speaks to a broader conversation around this was always going to be the path. And the US has strategic geopolitical incentives to get something done in this department and really integrate stablecoins into everything they're doing. Not only as sort of a what we've talked around, soaking up demand for our debt effectively as opposed to sort of internationally sort of waning demand for our treasuries. This sort of fits the bill there, but I think there's a broader geopolitical strategy here that this tweet kind of speaks to. But Michael, maybe I'll hand it to you to see your thoughts and hear what you think on this.
- [05:11]
Michael
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the stuff we're going to bring up is what we've been talking about for the past year. I think like you could actually go back and really look at the genesis of bitcoin and the crypto world and see it as a potential valve if monetary policy got out of whack and all of these things. Because the thing we've been saying there's a few. One is that from the administration clarity would get passed because we need it to the point. Brian's share but then also this realization about a year ago I had about stable coins were the most bullish thing to happen for bitcoin in a very long time. And we'll get into more of that with some of the things David Marcus said. But I think that you take the notion of like stable coins. The way I think about is like AI for money in the sense that we understand how impactful AI will be deflationary opening up the aperture for any firm to do things at the highest or the highest level that large firms could do. Think about that for money movement. Any business, any wallet could effectively become a bank. It can offer bank like services and probably better bank services. When you think about the rewards coupled with just money movement that banks have historically offered. And then just a few anecdotes, you know there's a, there was a note from somebody referencing it leg legitimizes crypto as a permanent part of the US financial infrastructure. So it's no longer fringe technology. Institutional participation now is clear roads. So when you think about exchanges, custodians, fintechs, banks and the amount of investments that can happen, all the IPO and MA and M and A that will occur from this and then more of these asset managers that can actually now allocate to this industry. So this was always one of the big overhangs I've. I've held. I think I truly believe this was a process that was always going to play out this way. We've talked about it for two years. When you think about FTX and all this offshore things that had to like blow up before the regulatory apparatus of the United States brought it into its fold and we're able to seize the arms around KYC and you know, think about Derebit sitting at Coinbase now. And I just think that this was a necessary part of the process to get, you know, the stripes, the Morgan Stanley's, everyone's turning these things on and it was always waiting until clarity before clarity would be coincide with the Morgan Stanley, Schwab and others turning on their products and then the flows could follow with that. And so I Think that we're just in the middle of seeing that the price is reflecting that, which is going to probably be a pretty bullish end of this decade. When you think about 2027, 2028, I do expect that all this stuff will naturally gravitate to bitcoin and cold stores. Then a lot of people are going to end up in losses and tears because when you increase the velocity and liquidity, then naturally things will go awry. But also for the people that are building fundamental products and services, it's going
- [07:58]
Liam
to be a very, very bullish decade.
- [08:03]
Brian
Yeah, we'll get into some of the announcements shortly. But on that point too, Stablecoins and Bitcoin generally do two massive things. It's just bringing dollar dominance across the world. And then bitcoin is the one asset that can inflate and really appreciate significantly over the next decade is the release valve, but still capture everything from a capital gains perspective without, you know, having things like housing, which appreciated so significantly over the past 40 years, and really increase the cost of living for everybody. So bitcoin is kind of positioned as this perfect release valve which can help the government monetize that alongside Stablecoin. So I'm sure we'll get into this a little bit more too. But there were a few other announcements on kind of this front.
- [08:49]
Liam
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to me it's what we've talked about, talked about around sort of just tightening the fidelity around dollars and Bitcoin and, and the ease of use across these new rails. And it's really more of a. It's like a normalization story to me because as it becomes integrated into the banking system, the regulatory apparatus, these new rails become more ingrained and less, I guess, less like toxic from a perspective or perception angle, which they have been basically since inception. Like whether that's the broader crypto space or bitcoin in particular. But I think what we've talked around sort of the ETFs as a starting gun for sort of this regulatory pathway. I think the Clarity act is the next big step in that trajectory and that journey of effective green lights for a lot of this stuff, which again, to the biggest, the biggest thing about it to me is just like the normalization of it and the removal of the toxicity around it. And yes, people are going to tokenize the world. You're going to have real world assets be a big component of a lot of these pushes. But as these things become normalized, it's just easier and easier for someone to have their dollar sit next to Bitcoin, learn more about Bitcoin, realize that that's the ultimate long term savings and you do what you need to do in stablecoins, whether that's earning rewards, which you can do basically across any platform at this point. If this language sticks and then you just save long term in bitcoin and that sort of becomes this educational or knowledge flywheel that becomes ingrained in the psyche of Americans but also just globally.
- [10:38]
Michael
Yeah, I mean so this is what we've been saying, but there's a reality this is going to take a very long time. We should get into some of the other announcements because ultimately like what we're talking about is very fringe. I saw a firm doing like tokenized money markets for SMBs and it was effectively just like building. It was like Wisdom Tree, I think partnered with them to offer the tokenized money market fund, which they don't need to use. But when you're a fiduciary or managing a small medium sized business, you're not going to go duct tape all this stuff together. You're effectively going to go to an asset manager and go that direction. And so I think about there's a level of client service and experience that you need. Like that's the thing that miss people miss in crypto. And there's a huge opportunity. There is like really wrapping these things around brands and services that are very like slow in the sense of building with confidence so real money can go there because it's such loose capital that plays in the space and you keep seeing it get lost. And so there's like this real. It's a notion of if anybody's ever built a business or building businesses, one of the hardest things you can do is to find talent. And one of the big pieces of finding talent is especially early is you need individuals with their hands that can be in the cloud and in the dirt. And what that means is one part of your brain has to think strategically and at the, we're seeing around corners. At the same time you can tactically be able to work and move progress day over day. And in the same way with building financial services, you need to be able to see around corners where the market's going. But you ultimately need to build to what the people will tolerate and work with that won't blow yourself up and won't confuse the hell out of them. And that's what you see a lot of the missing gaps. And it's very fascinating because I was listening to some like random banking podcasts with like regulators and they know the future's coming and they know they need to go there, but they're still tied to like the old world. And, and that's where I think that like that tension is going to be in the middle of all of it. So anyway, I agree, like the rewards will make sense, but a lot of people will just rather just go to the bank and not take the rewards because they just know that like their money won't go away when they start to see that people lost all their funds and all the other stuff that's going to happen.
- [12:45]
Liam
Yeah. Okay, so where do you want to go? We mentioned a lot of different headlines. You want to go to Stripe first?
- [12:50]
Michael
Yeah, I think Stripe.
- [12:54]
Liam
Let's see here.
- [12:56]
Brian
Sorry.
- [13:03]
Liam
So Stripe had a ton of announcements last week. Michael, I'll just hand it to you to start walking through what was said here.
- [13:11]
Michael
So if anybody's building, I mean, honestly, I can't truly think of a better time. There's really two barbells. And this is actually what's told to me very early on around building and financial services in general, whether it's Fiat or btc, is you want to get as close to the payments or you want to get as close to the underlying asset. And so you can make the case that both, if you want to plug into multi institution, that's early. But I still think that's a lot harder for people to wrap their heads around where payments touch so many things. And the design surface we're going to talk about over these next few segments is just absolutely incredible. And I think we talked about it on broadcast or last trade. I can't remember last week. But like, I think the Bridge acquisition by Stripe is going to just be fundamentally one of the best acquisitions that's ever taken place. I think already in dollar terms it's close to there because when they acquired Bridge for a billion dollars, they were about a hundred billion dollar firm. I think their last capital raise was about $150 billion. Now what stripe came out with, I guess it was 288 updates. I didn't have the time to go through all of it. But knowing what we know about our relationship with Stripe and when you look at like Link is a great example, like anybody, because a lot of these companies that Stripe has under its umbrella, you don't even necessarily know they're Stripe. So anybody that's ever gone through online payments or looking to authenticate, you have that link code that pops up on your phone, you put it into, you know, your, your like browser on your Phone or your computer and it'll link your card and it authenticates. That's just one small example of one of the things they rolled out for not only stablecoins but also agentic commerce. You can go to the wallets Bridge now using Stripe. So Bridge has their stable coin part of Stripe. You can effectively spend it anywhere where Stripe can be spent globally, crypto on ramps via APIs accepting bitcoins. It effectively opens up the ability for any intermediary, whether you're a startup, a bank, financial institution that sits anywhere on the planet earth to bring in local fiat, hold as local fiat, transfer into other currencies, earn rewards for yourself, for your clients, move them to another location. Think about like what Western Union does. You can do this tomorrow if you wanted to, but you can also do it with a company that's $150 billion that has the connections across the world and across Visa and other partnerships. And then they're taking it a step further from just the startup world to thinking about how agents and agenta commerce is going to play out, which I think is on its uptrend as we start to get more, you know, applications and you just start to really think about agents going on your behalf where you can give X number of dollars to go and execute a purchase for a pair of shoes you want or to send a family member fund, whether it's in the US or outside of the US It's a really incredible, just like design surface that I don't think we're even barely scratching the surface of. And people are going to be able to make incredible companies from those. Yeah, that's the strike link, Stripe link.
- [16:18]
Liam
So the link, the link deal is specifically for agented commerce, is that right?
- [16:24]
Michael
So I think it's for different, like it's almost like a, I don't say it's an SDK, but it's almost like an integration for agents. But I'm pretty sure it's for other things as well. So like for the agent you can say here's X number of dollars, you can go out, it goes out, you know, needs access to an API, access to a paywall. And then you can probably set if you just need to put your code in or the agent can put your code in but it ultimately just gives a certain percentage. And I don't know if you guys want to respond here because we can talk a little about some of the bridge stuff too that came out or I'm sorry, tempo with the wallet architecture. Like it all ties together. Like this is stripe Tempo had things on there platform that they rolled out and then Bridge also had things that they rolled out last week.
- [17:09]
Brian
Yeah, just on the stripe agentic stuff too. The it now can create agent. It can pay on your behalf for things and then create agent readable websites too. So you can sell directly to agents in the form factors that's best for them and just spin that up on your website or as well as LLM readable text files too that are optimal.
- [17:36]
Liam
Yeah. Want to move to the. How does this relate to the Tempo deal that we have pulled up here? New capabilities for subscriptions, auto pay per customer deposit attribution, invoice reconciliation and more.
- [17:46]
Michael
Yeah. So if you think about this in kind of like threefold because Ivan even had. This is the beauty and the not so nice part about like this show and in general is like we're just building and we're working and so I haven't been able to go deep here but what I know from a cursory from the relationships with them and what you see is if you think about and you kind of see this with like Amazon or Google like Google's a great example with the amount of like usually this word gets used a lot but it's actually true like synergy from a lot of the compute with Google cloud and the things happening there. But then also it feeds into Gemini and then it feeds into like AI search and the features feeds into search and ads. You have these like three prongs which is stripe and then you have that layer for accepting payments in money movement but really at a merchant and like payment level. And then you have on the other side so that's one side of the barbell and then on the other side you have the on ramps. This was the bridge acquisition. So it allows intermediaries to be able to facilitate bringing on local fiat converting to a stable coin. They acquired Privy. Privy is what it's kind of in the back end infrastructure. I wouldn't say it's. It's not multi institution sound but it doesn't need to be. It's effectively segregating those keys so you can like self custody that stable coin and it can be secure. So again like as agentic, you know AI and bad actors go on it's a little harder because it's sharding how you can authenticate to move the dollars. So it's a little. It's more secure than if you just had a password. So you have that like kind of think of Bridge and Privy. They were acquired at the same time. So they allow you to get the fiat in to some kind of stable coin. It's sitting there. And then the realization was from because the order was stripe existed, they bought Bridge or Privy. I can't remember the sequence. And then the other and then Tempo was founded with Paradigm and then a bunch of other like validators. And what this is is ultimately its own blockchain because they recognize whether it's fees owning the blockchain where the stable coins are moving. They want to own that intermed layer. So all the dollars and the way they're transferred they can manage from not only the movement, the fees, reversing transactions. Right. Just think about this as like another Swift network. Where the Tempo announcement was really interesting is because it brought a lot of things that have been missing in crypto and bitcoin. One of them is an easy example is subscriptions because these are naturally push networks. And now you can set up your wallet to pool which is very valuable because if you think about credit cards and other things, you want to be able to set up that wallet and then ultimately fund your agent or fund your subscription. But the other thing they did, and it sounds like innocent or naive because we've had this in bitcoin. But it's almost like hierarchical deterministic wallet structures because you can have the deposit address for stable coins and you can set up sub wallets underneath that because this helps with privacy when you think about stable coins and where the balance goes. But then it also helps around sub custody of certain wallets for permissioning. When you think about agenda commerce for just traditional like E Com or just like AI if you're going to be out there running whatever for vibe coding or if you're having it spend on your behalf. So you tie all that together and that's what they're building and then ultimately I think they're going to be very valuable. It's a little bit different, but the same when you think about like Claude and OpenAI is they're winning clients but they're also opening up this infrastructure for others to build on top. So the design surface when all these legacy payments and all these companies have these like strangleholds. You think about Western Union as an example. Now anybody can offer these services. It kind of is a mirror really to AI that the commodity is the tech now and ultimately it's the taste and then the design and the distribution that is going to like really reinvent the the web. And so you think about from an investment perspective it's super exciting. So yeah, hopefully that Gave this is my like cursor again because I haven't been able to do a deep dive. I'd love to, but you can just see it and we're, we're playing with these things day in and day out, so you get to get a feel for that design. Surface effectively dissolved all borders.
- [21:54]
Liam
Yeah. This is incredible. I think. How would you compare and contrast everything you just described with some of the other announcements from LightSpark? Because David Marcus's company, you know, he I think founded it a couple years ago after being at PayPal and then Facebook and having some notable very public failures in the sort of initial early stage stablecoin world. But then founding LightSpark, really becoming a bitcoiner in the truest sense and building around an open network. And lightspark and David Marcus have been absolutely shipping the past few weeks and months as well. So how would you sort of compare and trust everything you just talked about with Tempo and Bridge to what lightspark is building?
- [22:39]
Michael
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean I think we're gonna do a deep dive on all this because I think it, I honestly think The Light Spark 1 is a bigger long term announcement, but the stripe one's bigger short term. I don't know if it's similar to like Linux versus Microsoft Windows, but there's this notion that today, and it goes to the AI stuff, right, AI is, are going to use stable coins because it's what they know, but over time between the interoperability, the liquidity and the tooling, it'll naturally go to a neutral asset. LightSpark is taking a similar approach on a lot of the. Like think about it as, as the, the entry and exit nodes to onboard fiat and exit. And they have. This is where. This was always my pitch back in the day because there was no shortage of like bitcoin companies that try to do stuff over lightning and all of it. But they never really understood money flows. And it was always the thesis that the actual builders from Silicon Valley when they came in like a David Marcus were just gonna like clean up because they understood the flows and they have the connection. So they, I think lightspark last week announced that they have, I think only rain was the one before had the primary issuance. So now you have your LightSpark wallet. Now you can get a card and you can spend anywhere where Visa is accepted. But where to your question is what lightspark's doing is they developed their own kind of like sidechain effectively that uses lightning for interoperability and then they're converting those Fiats to whatever you ultimately want to be in. So you can be in your stablecoin on whatever chain you can be in Bitcoin. But it's really elegant because they use the liquidity from Bitcoin to effectively transfer into whatever pair they want. Because a lot of stable coins may not have the liquidity independent on the size. So they'll use Bitcoin and then they'll be able to transfer. If you're going to be into like USDC on Solana or Ethereum or USDB or whatever the currency is tether and then you can have that balance and you can pick, but you don't have to worry about any of it. You're not knowing that it's going from like a Solana to Bitcoin back to dollars. It's just sitting there based on the currency you want. And then when you go back out, they have a relationship. I forget exactly how or like what the formal relationship is with like square. So if you go and Download this new LightSpark wallet and I think I don't even necessarily know they have their own, I think that Bread wallet that was like a crypto wallet last a couple weeks ago they released that's one of the first ones building on this grid network. So you can download that wallet, you can accept any stable coins. Bitcoin sits at the balance you want it to. Then you can just literally roll up to cash app square. Now the other tap to pay. You just tap it and you'll be able to pay without knowing about any of that. And then everybody can build on this kind of backend. And I believe they're also using Privy because while Privy is not like this hardcore secure bitcoin solution, it is the thing that allowed for a lot of these wallets to effectively be on your phone and secure a decent amount of, you know, crypto, whether it's stable coins, Bitcoin or you know, whatever else you want while not having the risks that are associated with just like securing it solely on your phone. And this is effectively like their angle is building with Bitcoin. Their, their angle also is that this wins long term because a, you don't have to know about any of these assets. They're using the intermediary lever layer. And instead of taking the route of like Tempo and that stablecoin and having to move the stable coin coins and worry about it, you have this like bridge that you can use lightning liquidity to manage the conversions. But then ultimately as more and more merchants start to adopt just Bitcoin versus a traditional Stablecoin or rolling out their own. They can sit at this intermediary layer to transfer, transact and then play the long game, which is ultimately all going to Bitcoin. And so I think that is like super interesting where you can sell it to an enterprise, if I was in their shoes. And you can effectively say we're playing what you need today, where you don't have to actually pick what Stablecoin you want to accept. And then we're playing into the future where ultimately you'll be able to bypass. And then they have this nice business model where they're able to take any kind of the yield, car interchange, FX margin that you're showing here.
- [27:01]
Liam
Yeah, this is all super fascinating and it's interesting to me because I think conceptually what Marcus has built here is somewhat similar to like what Strike pioneered a few years ago around like bitcoin being the interchange layer and being able to send different fiat currencies and have bitcoin settlement layer be sort of this bridge. But this is kind of, it's kind of that concept conceptually, but like on steroids because it's opening the aperture to any sort of stablecoin, any fiat. And so it's kind of taking that idea in my mind to the next level. And so from that perspective, it's super interesting because there are parallels with what Bridge and Tempo are doing, but it's built on this more open network sort of at the spine of it. And then I think maybe we'll talk a bit about this. But Marcus was on what Bitcoin did podcast and great listen for anybody who wants to learn more about everything they're building. But I thought it was, it was interesting how he positioned like the flywheel of adoption of this stuff. Like it's not just that it's built on bitcoin and it's open and permissionless, it's. There's actual revenue incentives for whether it's the users, the companies, the brands, anyone basically managing money movement. There is real, basically financial incentives for people to adopt this stuff. It's not only faster, but it's cheaper, you can own more of the revenue and basically it's just a much better system. And so I think that's super interesting to see and think this is. I think you're right, Michael. It's probably a longer burn in terms of the adoption story of this stuff. And maybe Bridge and Tempo are sort of the near term story, but both
- [28:52]
Brian
super important, working in parallel 100% and the real innovation too with this lightspark deal is that they seem to have figured out the liquidity problem for launching your own stable coin because they can seamlessly swap. Swap between any stable coins describes them as fungible. Based on this chain, I need to do a little bit more of a deep dive here too. But that allows for kind of the cold start problem as any of these large folks with networks like YouTube or somebody like that launching their own stablecoin natively. And then yeah, in addition, just having the greater bitcoin liquidity anywhere in the world is just going to drive further liquidity as there's more and more flows in and out, making it more usable for anybody trading the asset and thus just more folks who come into bitcoin in general as larger institutional investors want more liquidity.
- [29:46]
Michael
Yeah, I think there's three like core components to think about if somebody's building investing the opportunities at as it relates to bitcoin or just money movement. One is just the notion that stablecoins because they're programmable, allow for the swapping. That was never the case before with dollars because dollars had to sit at this archaic level between ach, Swift or wherever they were locally. So the second you move it to a different layer, you can move and swap. So that's one aspect. The other one is that notion now being next to bitcoin you open up the, the, the idea in somebody's mind that money is digital. And then as you figure out whether it's gamifying or next to it in the wallet as inflation, because that's the thing that nobody talks about is stablecoins don't still fix. This is actually an interesting point for you guys. So stablecoins obviously don't fix like the inflation problem. So then now you have the ability for individuals to see those wallets in this where bitcoin companies will have an interesting edge next to the wallet, putting those experiences close to it. And so that'll naturally help in bitcoin adoption. The last layer that it's going to be interesting to see play out is this is just truly the best example is like the blockbuster Netflix stuff is like Blockbuster couldn't even fathom that you could just change the plane you're playing on and disintermediate the physical world via digital streaming. So it's the same thing when like natives are going to come into think about the whole world and how it exists. Whether it's how your pay, your payroll gets distributed bimonthly or monthly or if you're a creator and how you have to lock it in to X and then you have your counterparty risk for 30, 60 days until you get paid out. These are small examples, but this whole streaming notion is going to just change the dynamic of like how everything we've accepted fundamentally can be changed. The last thing I'll say, and it's part of where this early writers exist and where we believe there's a huge alpha and edge between the new world, but then also understand the old world and that taste for branding. But then where bitcoin sits is because as great as everything we just said, at least on the stripe bridge privy side, they don't actually understand money like money from a value from how money was created or got here and what bitcoin is. And I don't know if you guys saw this. I had retweeted it. It was the, the guy at Privy, the CEO and he was talking about with some of these launches that there's new stable coins coming out that are inflation adjusted and then like energy back and you can see how they'll try it. It actually makes sense from an, from a, you could see how a consumer normie would say, oh, I want an inflation adjusted, you know, stable coin. It goes up, blah, blah, blah. But the point being is, look, you're bitcoin, you're describing bitcoin. And I also got this feeling from Zach Abrams who's obviously world class move money movement, but he was also somebody that I don't. I forgot what he said. It was on the cheeky PS podcast a couple months ago. But you can just get a feel that he didn't understand bitcoin. And so this is where again goes back to light spark. Yeah, here it is. It's just so fascinating that you know, inflation adjusted stable BO could be something. You could tell he's like hinting like this is coming. It's like, yeah, you're just guy. I mean funny enough he liked the tweets though, you know, that's nice.
- [33:08]
Liam
But yeah, no, that was, that was good stuff. All right, anything else on. On sort of the world of stable coins and money movement before we move on to some other digital asset roundup
- [33:21]
Michael
topics, the only thing that, that I'll add is on that pod, David Marcus said this thing, which was taboo still for probably a lot of people listening, and we've been saying it for like over a year, is that stablecoins are the most bullish thing to happen to bitcoin. And David Marcus called it his like realization. He referenced that it was straight Cash app and what they were doing with Like Solana in the background and on the stablecoin front. But I just expect more and more people to recognize this, that they're not. They're. They're just rails and they're better rails to get liquidity into Bitcoin, really, that's all it is. And as that starts to proliferate and people understand inflation and then you have this other asset and the tooling gets better, the amount of flows it's going to bring is just going to be insane. They'll be looked at so obvious in hindsight, this dawned on me like a year ago when I just. It was more left barbell of like tether and its liquidity are. Are directly correlated with amount of btc, the amount of tethers printed, amount of bitcoin. And it's not because it's a Ponzi, it's amount of dollars coming into the crypto ecosystem flow to BTC over time. And so think about that as like, you know, on a degree of 1 to 100, that's a 2. And this is what we're talking about, literally 100. It's like the whole world's becoming digitized and dollars become digitized and they're incentivizing them to become digitized by. And that's how you end up in this world where bitcoin's just going to completely rip.
- [34:36]
Liam
It's wild. That's very well said. And it's wild that it's not more obvious that that's the case because exactly as you described, if you rewind to the advent of tether, that was wildly bullish for bitcoin adoption and people could just kind of forget about that. And I think it partly probably stems from this ideological sort of infighting of bitcoin people versus crypto people. But like, the reality is like again, the advent of tether was wildly bullish and important for bitcoin adoption. Just creating that native digital rail to be able to swap into btc. And this is. You're exactly right. Like this is the next evolution of that and really broadening it to the masses, getting it in the regulatory apparatus, all of those things that take it to the next level.
- [35:24]
Brian
Yeah, that's very well said. And David Marcus kind of went through his whole journey too, trying to start Libra. And I think many of the folks have kind of a similar one of trying to find a better bitcoin or dats that are actually better than holding bitcoin itself and then coming to the realization, no, it's really just bitcoin probably coming a little bit too far ideologically. And then finally having the realization stablecoins and bitcoin are going to be the most bullish combination ever. And kind of meeting consumers and the market where they are is the only real way that you're going to see much faster bitcoin adoption and building better services that way. It can't really just be from an ideological perspective, despite what we would all like to see ideally. Check out earlyriders.com for all the latest in bitcoin investment research. Now back to the show 100%.
- [36:16]
Liam
All right, let's get to some other topics, some other headlines. Michael, you tweeted about this one this morning. I haven't looked deeply into it, but what happened here with Kraken parent company payword alleges $25 million crypto custody fraud and lawsuit against Atana and firm CEO.
- [36:33]
Michael
Yeah, so I don't necessarily know why Kraken was using Atana. Atana was a, I believe it's Colorado based qualified custodian. It goes under that vintage of qualified custodians that were kind of unqualified custodians, meaning they had the like regulatory kind of operational stature to go get a license to manage underlying from a fiduciary perspective, assets outside of just crypto. But they more than likely didn't have the technical chops and also it sounds like even the procedural drops. So in a nutshell, they misappropriated funds because they commingled underlying assets that I guess were some of Kraken was using Atanas for self custody. Some of those assets were misappropriated. They were falsifying some of the balance sheet audits as they were doing so Kraken had no idea. And then as everything happens in this industry when the tide goes out, then you start to see who's naked. And so I guess something happened last year. Assets weren't able to be fulfilled whether it was redemptions from Kraken or underlying clients. I had heard about this about six to 12 months ago, but it wasn't really like live. And then I just popped up this morning now cracking, suing them. I think the big takeaway here, and this is something we just continue to talk about is that this just whole notion that custody has been figured out like we are so insanely early. When you think of the part of that was that when Brian was talking in the beginning about we recognize rewards and money flows and all of these things will happen. The problem is that we are on the very edges of this. If you're Listening to a podcast like this, you're have agency, you're wanting to learn more. If you go on Twitter, you form of agency, you're seeing this stuff and there's also a lot of noise. But to like go from there to the person that just goes and signs up for Wells Fargo and then leaves because they heard something better, it's a. There's a lot of like friction between that and then when you think about real money, because cash out's a great business. But if you think about the market they serve is people that are just disenfranchised, they don't have access to bank accounts. It's not like traditional money is leading Goldman Sachs to go to these deals. So point being is we're so early to all of that, including the custody side that the market just fundamentally believes and it makes sense because there's never been a new form of money. So why would there be a new form of custody for the new form of money? And this has been a big point of like the DAT stuff and just like assuming that that underlying custody will always be there. That's just like a very scary assumption to make. If you've been around long enough, you know, that's a big point of failure. And so this just highlighted it. It's because somebody has sophisticated and been along as Kraken was able to use them for self against sub custody and then ultimately they were able to paper over it for years that this is just something that everyone should look at because the omnibus I think structure for large pools of capital is going to be not accepted or tolerated long term. And then the notion that any single custodian can move or lose the assets. I'm going to write this, but I was thinking about it this morning that it's so insane that we do accept that the form of custody that exists today will be in the future. And the one of the main points from that is A, we've never really had Bitcoin over a hundred thousand for like that's for a long enough time. But think about 100, 250, $500,000. But B, we never had it at the same time with the proliferation of AI and so all of these different crazy like that, whether it's Mythos or the OpenAI's new they have a new tool that's out there like effectively like pen testing infrastructure to see if there's any vulnerabilities because all this stuff was coded by individuals so agents can at scale go and find the vulnerabilities, think about what that looks like where all these firms now are getting targeted by all these different entities, agentic or sovereigns. And you're just like, oh, we're going to trust a single custodian and they're going to have all the permissions and all the best practices. Like, it's not going to be accepted long term. And so anyway, that's just kind of like this is just another point. We see these weekly, we'll see these monthly, we'll see these annually, and then we'll see big ones as the price goes up because that liquidity just starts to get. The velocity increases.
- [40:29]
Liam
Yeah, it definitely seems like the past few weeks like the, the AI enforced sort of security breaches are only accelerating. And like, I think the big thing, I agree with everything you just said, but I think the big gap in most people's brains is like, you've also just never seen a digital bearer asset. And so like the notion that single custodians can persist in perpetuity, like that worked in the traditional world. But when you have a digital bearer asset, whether it's Bitcoin or any other crypto asset, like, it just fundamentally changes how you need to secure something long term. Like, you can't afford to have a single custodian on a long enough timeframe because if there is a single point of failure, it will be. You can. You need to work under the assumption that it'll be exploited at some point. Even if you have the most robust security measures and procedures, like if you're a single entity, it's possible that you get compromised at some point in the future. And so you need redundancy, you need fault tolerance. And I think we're still. I think you're right. I think we're still very early in terms of sort of the broader market recognizing that those characteristics of these assets are super unique and you need to build unique architectures to solve for those challenges effectively.
- [41:49]
Brian
And just on that point too, any weak point is going to be exploited and found too, because there's going to be money to made either by poor security or if there are fund rehypothecations or any kind of weak point in just the actual liquidation price, et cetera. Like there are folks out there who are smarter than you and can use AI in order to find where those weak points are. And they will, just because there's incentive to.
- [42:18]
Liam
Yep. All right, let's go to another announcement from last week. We've got a few to get through here from the conference block. Announces BitKey wallet with a Screen automatic Bitcoin earning on cash app and proof of reserves. Thoughts on this one, gentlemen?
- [42:36]
Michael
I think, I mean the proof of reserves I think make sense that they would do. We've talked about it. Probably don't have to go deep here that it only takes care of one part. You still have the custody issue. The bit keys is fascinating because they have this scale that I think they, they. I, I heard, I don't know if this is true, but it sounds right like they're the, they sell the most hardware devices I guess for bitcoin only because it wouldn't be over ledger but you know, think about it over treasures, Bitcoin only and coin kites. But it's interesting because they like appease the market. Like I feel like, I don't know, I think that there's a real big aspect in security with bitcoin that a lot of people build things but they don't necessarily have like worked with the individual user at scale to see like what works and what doesn't. And so the bit key is interesting that okay they added the screen because there's a lot of pushback that you can't see on the device. For anybody that's not aware, you want to be able to see on the device if you're sending assets because if your screen's manipulated like your laptop or whatever you're using, you want to be able to authenticate on something that's not connected to the Internet. But then they took away the thing that actually is probably more or just as important which is the seed. Like you need to be able to like reconstitute and so they went seedless. And it, it's a very interesting dynamic because it tells me like they're, they're trying to build for everyone and no one, there's no like real thesis. We're like in that world it's fundamentally better to have a, a coal car. And it's like the, the thing I anchor back to is Leishman said it once on a pod was if you have to be convinced of self custody you probably shouldn't, right? And this is like somebody trying to convince you to self custody but they're not giving you all the tools. And it's, it's, it's again eerily similar with like the bitcoin stuff. It's like if the volatility scares you, you should get more conviction and confidence and then the volatility won't scare you. It's not to go buy something else that may, may leave you with less Bitcoin, because ultimately if you have no seed, you have this screen, there's different points of authentication that can be manipulated where you can lose the assets because you never fundamentally understood the an point, which is the seed phrase, and how you can reconstitute the, the wallet and re, you know, constitute your, your Bitcoin outside of its platform. So it's just kind of like, I don't know, it's. It's interesting.
- [44:48]
Liam
Yeah, it is. And, and just a, a note on the proof of reserves aspect of this. We're going to be writing more about this in the near future, but I think it's sort of, it's continues to gain steam as like this thing to do in the Bitcoin and, and custody realm to provide some sort of proof of reserves. And as we've discussed, like a point in time, snapshot of your reserves is just, it's a, it's. I guess it's a nice to have, but it's not something to put a ton of faith in because tomorrow something could happen, you could have an infiltration or security breach. And that proof of reserve snapshot from yesterday is completely irrelevant. And so what the sort of proper evolution of proof of reserves is, is what I'm calling like proof of ownership, which, to your point, Michael, it's like you just need to have a segregated vault like that and sort of this omnibus structure will continue to persist just because it, you know, it sort of has been the norm. But like, for real wealth and real balances, like, you want your own vault, you want to be able to segregate it, see it on chain, and have proof of ownership, basically being able to reconstitute the wallet, see it on chain, know that it's not commingled with other funds in an omnibus structure. And that's how you have actual real visibility and 247 transparency into like, okay, the assets are there. My, you know, my Bitcoin sits there. I could see it, it hasn't moved. So that's just a whole, it's a whole nother level of proof of reserves. And so I think we'll, we'll keep seeing people do this because it's sort of become in zeitgeist of like, this is the thing to do to provide transparency. But I think there's, there's obvious sort of holes in it. It's not only the sort of, it's just the asset side, not the liability side of the balance sheet, but it's also that this, this sort of snapshot notion which, like, I Think is, is critically overlooked in sort of the discourse around this stuff.
- [46:55]
Michael
Yeah. And just to give like more credence so it isn't like the, the reason there's two reasons why nobody, everyone's doing that is because again, you go back to the mental model of, well, there can't be a new form of custody for a new form of money. This is what we know, this is what we've invested in, this is what we do. And then the other side of it is we've already seen this happen. There was Coin DX or CDX in India that I think Coinbase had a bailout that was part of their acquisition, but they actually had proof of reserves and then they lost all the funds. You can manipulate the proof of reserves. You can do it. All right. The next day they're stolen, hacked, misappropriated and they're gone. And so it's effectively like window dressing versus actually doing it the right way. And to Brian's point, I think it's something we should lean into because ultimately we see the market going in the direction of multi institution because the clients will demand it. But until more and more people know about that, because we find out via this POD and others, even though we talk about it for anybody that's tired of listening about it, a lot of people still have no idea how it works, that the assets are set, segregated, they're on chain, they're titled to the client, there's video verifications with multiple institutions. I, I don't necessarily know what clients believe but, or prospective clients, but we have to do a lot better to educate and articulate that to the broader market. And then we're working with a lot of business development partnerships for other firms just to build on top of this
- [48:15]
Brian
as well, a hundred percent. It's, it's nice to know that they're not actively rehypothecating at the moment that they've posted. And you know, even that is not necessarily perfect with the lack of proof of liabilities. But it's definitely not like an end state. It's like a marginal upgrade. But I did think that their tap to pay as well as, you know, offering dollars over lightning too for all merchants out there is going to be, you know, something that's, you know, slightly innovative, put it pushing things forward too. They're obviously super focused on new features too and kind of tease that they're going to be checking even more soon too. So will be interesting, I think that they report later this week on if they give any data about how many People are actually paying over lightning or even in dollars or Bitcoin too.
- [49:07]
Ramp Representative
If the bitcoin price doubled tomorrow, would you feel good about how it's being secured right now? Most people have not really pressure tested that and I get it. I have talked to people who have self custody for over a decade and others who stayed on exchanges because they could never get comfortable managing their own keys. Both camps have real concerns. That is why we built on Ramp multi institution custody so no single company can lose it, move it or use it. Lloyd's of London insurance, inheritance planning built in and a team that can walk you through the entire setup. Get started in 15 minutes. Book a free consultation@onrampbitcoin.com on ramp secured by three controlled by me.
- [49:47]
Liam
Yeah, well said. Moving on. Liam, I might hand this one to you. Aven launches bitcoin backed Visa card offering up to $1 million credit lines without asset sales. What's the deal with this? I'd never heard of this company Aven before, but they had made a splash with this last week at the conference.
- [50:08]
Brian
Yeah, so they're actually pretty interesting. They've been around I think since 2011 or something. They've done about 2 billion in total loans to date. A lot of them are they're actually putting assets or having some asset collateral that folks have to post in order to get lower interest rates. So a lot of times you have really horrible interest rates for credit cards and home equity. But if you post some collateral then you can actually just reduce those rates and it changes based on different LTVs. So they launched essentially a credit cards and bitcoin loan which sub custody is the asset. With Bitco, I believe that up to a certain point you can get a separate segregated account on this as well. And they have some of the lowest rates in the industry to my understanding. So 8.8% if you have 30% LTBs and then it rises from there up to like 12 I think if you do 70%. And what's really interesting about this too is they've already bootstrapped all the lending capital too so you can have a 10 year loan repayment offer where I believe you don't actually have to pay any of the principal for the first five years. And I thought that this was particularly interesting is there are new folks who, you know, it sounded like the founder CEO was interested in creating this product for a long time, but regulatory climate just wasn't necessarily friendly enough to actually launch it. And having bootstrapped the capital and having lenders who trust you on the other side actually made this possible today, especially with all the different regulations. So great to see new innovation coming through the pipeline and longer terms too. And you know, props to Aven.
- [51:56]
Michael
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think the big innovation here, and he's talked about it, is ultimately they have the capital markets chops because when they first started the business, there was nothing different than they were doing than traditional HELOC scoring and credit scoring. But then as they get more data, more efficiencies, they can pass that and to the client. They can pass that to the client, but then they ultimately can take that data, have proprietary risk scoring and then what Liam was sharing is have those connections with different capital markets firms to have that liquidity there. Because that's really been the missing part piece for Bitcoin Mac loans to drive down the price is sophisticated participants that are offering them to understand it, but then also have the chops to go get the dollars. That's again, just ties back to what we've been talking about is this new wave of entrepreneurs. This guy also happens to be in Silicon Valley. They'll understand this pristine collateral, but that's not enough. You have to be able to communicate it and then go out and source those dollars and build other products. And so this is another one to come to market. I think it's super interesting and valuable. I will say though, there's still like credit tied to it. So it's a little bit fundamentally different than what Aladdin or Arch would offer. That's solely predicated on the underlying collateral that you are going to like have a credit pool.
- [53:11]
Liam
Yeah, from what I heard the CEO talking about, it's. It's more than just a credit pull, but it's also some pretty stringent like income verification, which I think is a. Allows some of these lower terms to be possible. Okay, a couple other quick ones before we wrap up on a similar sort of line to what we were talking about earlier. Rain is now a MasterCard principal member. I think they were previously already a Visa principal member. So now just expanding even further. Greater choice for our partners backed by the same stablecoin powered authorization and settlement technology under the hood. So crypto cards continue to accelerate. We're seeing more and more of this. Any thoughts on this one?
- [53:55]
Brian
Interesting to see, but we'll see more both Bitcoin and stablecoin credit cards coming out in the future. I think with being able to pass pay with the ether.
- [54:06]
Michael
Yeah. And just to gloss over, it was something I had heard about Meta last week announced some of their payments for I think creators. SoFi has come out publicly. Robinhood, MasterCard, all these large fintechs that are publicly traded have announced some level of integrations. But then my understanding that it's almost any fintech public or private is working on these rails and a lot of them are obfuscating. You don't have to necessarily explain stablecoins, you have to explain all this is I think how bitcoin will end up permeating all financial products and technology in general is it'll just sit in the background as better Rails, better savings technology. But almost every firm that's doing something here or technology firm and the thing that I think is the most bullish for all of this is that they understand consumers are going to drive the adoption and what their demand is and that's the thing that has the banks scratching their head right now is because like well what are consumers going to demand in the future? They're banks. So they've been playing in a different realm and so now they have to really think through and there's no shortage of exciting things where you can think about stuff. We're building with on ramp multi institution custody to be able to have this vault almost like this version of a credit or facility of this hard asset and then ultimately with stable coins with cards, just do so much and live your day to day life that you couldn't have done before. So it's going to be really exciting to see the fintechs, the bitcoin native firms and then the banks all try to effectively give the client and the end user the best experience for money management and really wealth preservation because that's the name of the game. It's how do you like preserve and grow your wealth which we know bitcoin has, but then you still need to live your day to day life. And then the last part is obfuscating all that so it feels commercially like just nice. And what you would expect in using any other fintech like a Mercury is a great like benchmark because Mercury just crushed it on the business side because it gave better business banking when historically banks were just horrible at that 100%.
- [56:06]
Liam
Okay, maybe last one big announcement from last week, although I think this was kind of expected that 21 capital, the Bitcoin treasury company that they don't call a bitcoin treasury company in partnership with Tether Softbank and Jack Mallor is at the head announced that they're going to buy or merge with Strike and acquire a couple other bitcoin companies. As well. I think this was kind of always what people thought was going to happen with 21 Capital, given Jack's involvement, that they would acquire or merge with Strike. And that is now in process. I think what sticks out to me about this is just like it felt like early on this was basically a year ago that this thing was announced. The sort of SPAC deal went through. It felt like they were going to ride the treasury company thing and then the treasury company started blowing up. So then they sort of distanced themselves from that and then sort of pivoted to now this sort of acquisition play. But I think the other way you can look at it is like this was always going to be the path was this was a merger acquisition vehicle for Strike.
- [57:18]
Brian
Yeah, it sounds like they're still going to do perpetuals too. That's probably not quite as interesting for our audience just because it's been talked about to death, but it is interesting trying to. Who knows if it'll work or not. But it's been an idea for a while, being a conglomerate, almost Berkshire Hathaway for Bitcoin companies acquiring those companies out there. I think what we're starting to see is obviously backed by Tether pretty significantly. I think that they have all the preferred shares too, or not all of them, but complete voting share. They are probably going to do two things. One, use capital as a weapon like in the Lift Wars, Uber and Lift wars, or you know, even what Standard Oil did back in however long ago, which was use Teller's massive amounts of treasury in order to either acquire competitors or just undercut the market long enough that, you know, some of them go out of business. I think that we'll probably see that on the lending side as Tether probably ramps that up. And then the other side is the distribution of Tether and USDT and USAT when that happens as well. And finally their gold stable coin too, which I think that they really want to see. So would imagine that in terms of targets, they probably do more in the mining space, maybe acquire a mining pool just given the electron side. Maybe something where there's the intersection of AI and Bitcoin mining as well as on the wallet side in order to get this USDT distributed across the world as much as possible. Maybe you can acquire a Zappo bank like Bitcoin bank across South America too and potentially different areas of the world. So interesting to see especially what's going to happen on any M and A. I mentioned the Electron and Strike deals take some time, but over a longer time period. This is going to be interesting to follow.
- [59:15]
Liam
Yeah, certainly we will keep track of this one. All right, man, I think that's a good place to wrap. Thanks everybody for joining and we'll see you next week.
- [59:27]
Brian
Thanks, Brian.
- [59:28]
Liam
Later. 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.