Mike Novogratz: Bitcoin’s Escape Velocity, Bond Market Crisis, Crypto x AI, & the Genius Act

Mike Novogratz returns to Bankless to unpack Bitcoin’s surge to new all-time highs and what it means in a world grappling with fiscal uncertainty. We dive into the unfolding bond market crisis, why the Genius Act marks a new chapter for stablecoins, the tokenization of traditional finance, and how Galaxy is uniquely positioned at the crossroads of crypto and AI. This is a front-row seat to the changing macro tides and crypto’s place in the new financial order. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠BINANCE | THE WORLDS #1 CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/binance ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:18 Bitcoin Hitting All-Time High 1:57 Trump’s Tariffs' Effect on Bitcoin 5:56 Liz Truss Moment 2.0? 7:33 US Liz Truss’s Effect 8:49 Bitcoin, Gold, and the US Dollar 12:11 BTC as a New World Asset 15:29 Treasuries in Decline 18:05 Galaxy Going Public 21:26 The Genius Act 24:32 Anti-Crypto Army Gone? 27:03 US Consumer Crypto Market 31:22 Tokenizing Galaxy Assets on ETH 34:08 A Roadmap From SEC in the Future? 36:53 Year of Crypto IPOs? 38:30 TradFi Fades, Crypto Rises 39:46 The Terra Luna Case 44:05 Future of Galaxy and Crypto 50:48 Building and Scaling Data Centers 55:18 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Mike Novogratz https://x.com/novogratz Galaxy Digital https://www.galaxy.com/ Tokenization & RWAs (Galaxy Report) https://www.galaxy.com/research/insights/tokenization-and-the-future-of-finance/ ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  We still got a bull run coming, right? It's not over yet for crypto?

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Bull run's just starting today.

• 0:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  You got price targets?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  I mean, listen, we need this finish this week over 10750, you know, 107500. If Sunday night, we're at 108, 109, you're going to be at 130 before you can bat an eye.

• 0:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Mike Novogratz, Bitcoin just hit an all time high at the time of recording. We're at 109,900 as the all time high price of Bitcoin. Price might vary by the time listeners get this episode, but can we just like, celebrate that for a minute? All time highs don't happen very often. How are you feeling about that?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Listen, I think from the time Larry Fink bought Bitcoin, up until then, we were all pushing this snowball up the hill.

• 0:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  And then it got to the top of the hill and it stayed there for a while. And now it started to roll downhill and that snowball is adoption. It's the community orange pilling and pulling more people into the community. And Larry was like the big Kahuna to orange pill, but now you've got sovereign wealth funds, you've got retail equity investors coming through all these micro strategy and micro strategy lookalike products. You've got normal retail, you've got normal institutions. It just feels like we are at escape velocity. Listen, we're going to have to close above and stay above 106, 107 for three, four days, but that'll open up 130, 130, 150, and then you're in price discovery. And so why is it happening?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  A, adoption and B, you know, you look at what's going on in DC, we're not going to have a 3% budget deficit this year. We're going to have a higher than last year budget deficit, which was not in anyone's bingo card, right? You know, I love Scott Besson. I think he's doing a good job, but he was promising us 3%. I think I have a bet with pump 3% above, he owes me 1,000 pushups and 3% below, I owe him 1,000. And so that guy better start working out.

• 1:57David Hoffman?

  Mike, can you just place us into context, right? Because Bitcoin high, all time highs, they happen because of reasons. And you identified some of the local reasons, the news event cycles that are happening right now. It's no coincidence to me that the all time high is happening right on the backs of the positive Senate vote towards the Genius Act. But there's also just downstream of just four or five weeks ago, Trump announced the tariff day, the elaboration day tariffs. And so that is ensuing. There's just a bunch of contexts that's happening around this Bitcoin all time high. So read into that context for me.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Well, listen, the dollar as the reserve currency is under stress. It's hard to go around and tell the whole world they lied, cheated and stole on you. And that they should come and kiss your ass or be your 51st state and have them say, hey, let's keep more dollars. Right? And so we are debasing our dollar, both in our brand, but also as an economic lever. And so when the dollar is selling off, other assets get more valuable by definition. And so you've got part short dollar in this. You've got part real worry about fiscal stability globally, right? Look at the Japanese long bond. It's on a free fall. Our long bond took out 5% today.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  And so when people start losing faith in G10 bond markets, they got to put their money somewhere. And so gold, silver, broadly equities often, but commodities and now Bitcoin is digital gold. All fulfilling that role.

• 3:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. So where do you think this ends? It's interesting, we just had Arthur Hayes on the podcast. He was giving us some forecasts, right? And his take is basically like the Trump administration has pushed tariffs about as far as they can. And they're kind of like backtracking, but their next maneuver is going to be to continue to erode treasuries as the world reserve asset, like almost intentionally.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not intentionally.

• 3:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  You don't think intentionally?

• 4:00Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  I love Arthur and Arthur is a lot smarter than I am, but I have been in this treasury market for 35 years. I know Scott Bessent well. You do not erode the confidence in. The largest bond market in the world, when you owe $35 trillion.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  That would be like the definition of insanity.

• 4:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  But Arthur's take is they kind of have to if they're going to fix the trade imbalance, right? And like capital controls might be the next thing and then yields will increase. But the way that Besen gets out of that is basically he calls Powell and we get quantitative easing, you know, V2 and you know.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  The Fed is staying so far away from this. I mean, just look at every Powell press conference. He does not want to go in and have to support the market. You're not going to see Besen might use his authority to go buy long bonds, but Powell's not coming in to say I'm buying long bonds because it's not his role, right? Like this is self inflicted by this administration. And I think you're going to see a bit of a Mexican standoff. If Powell thinks stability is at risk, if he thinks inflation is at risk and or jobs, he'll move. But he's got that dual mandate and a little bit of market stability. And so like we'll see if the bond market's in free fall, I'm sure there'll be plenty of meetings and they'll try to come

• 5:20Speaker 01

  up with something. But roughly when the UK had happened, right? Liz Truss was gone.

• 5:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Right? And so we don't have a parliamentary system where you can throw out the president, but we have a system where you can change the bill he's working on, right? You can change the tariff negotiation. Like no president in the history of America has beaten the bond market. The bond market is the 600 pound gorilla king of the ring.

• 5:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I mean, do you think we get some kind of Liz Truss moment? Do you think that could be heading towards that?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  We're, we're, today feels a little bit like one.

• 5:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? What's happening today?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Long bonds have sold off. There was an auction that didn't go well. As soon as that thing didn't go well, bonds sold off another 6, 7%. Took equities from up on the day to down on the day, took Bitcoin from up on the day to flat. The markets are nervous.

• 6:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm the macro neophyte here. I'm going to need help understanding what the Liz Truss moment means. Ah, okay. Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  When Liz Truss's government got elected, they came out with a really radical idea to help transform the British economy and the bond market said, no, no, no, no, no, we will punish you. And she was out of a job, literally in three weeks.

• 6:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like yields spiked, basically, right?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  And like that kind of-

• 6:42David Hoffman?

  Bond sold off, yields spiked and she lost her job.

• 6:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's almost like-

• 6:45David Hoffman?

  The bond market was back up.

• 6:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  If the bond market, they used to call them the bond market vigilantes. If you're doing something wrong and no one wants to lend you money, you gotta change what you're doing because our whole government is based on borrowing money. And we've had the largest, you know, debt in the history of the world. It accelerated a tremendous amount during Trump won and Biden won, right? We had bad debt before Trump won, but then it was already expanding. And then COVID happened and both parties were like, oh, it's a party. Now, they had to do something, right? In a pandemic, but they did, they did a lot more than they needed to. And now we're suffering from it.

• 7:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  So let's say we get a continuation of this, right? The bond sell off, you know, yields increase. We get sort of the US's version of a Liz Truss moment. What happens?

• 7:35Speaker 01

  You're gonna have to see more fiscal hawkishness, right? And so this package that they put out, we're cutting taxes on tips, cutting taxes on overtime, not raising taxes on anyone and spending more on the military. The market's saying, no, spend less.

• 7:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  So fiscal reforms, spend less?

• 7:55Speaker 01

  I think you've got to tighten fiscal. The Fed's in an awkward position because, you know, if you're, should, and they're not gonna raise rates, but this becomes inflationary. Like when the bond market is selling off, it's telling you you're worried about inflationary impulse. Right? You might change the tariff, like tariffs are short-term inflationary. There's absolutely no way around it. They're a long-term, probably deflationary if they slow the economy, but short-term, they're inflationary. They are literally tax hikes. And so it's a very tricky mix. Your job as the Treasury Secretary, and quite frankly, your job as the President, is to instill confidence in American markets. And when the markets are falling like this, they're saying, "We're getting less confident." Right?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  When the dollar falls, it's saying, "We're getting less confident."

• 8:41David Hoffman?

  Mike, is Bitcoin all-time high day today? As you identified, we're already $3,000 off that, I think because of the Treasury market that you were citing. It's been gold all-time high season for the last quarter or so. I'm wondering, do you think this is the same story? And Bitcoin is just lagging? Are these, is there, are these telling two different stories?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Listen, they're cousins. They're kissing cousins. Well, gold is going higher because as central banks diversify, they're buying a lot of gold. And they're taking big chunks of gold off the market. That's mostly the BRIC central banks. They trust, they would have less money in the United States than they used to. And that's logical. And so, you don't have central banks buying Bitcoin yet. Right? You have some sovereign wealth funds dabbling in it. Right? Abu Dhabi said they bought over 500 million bucks worth, so that's not a dabble, that's a bite. But not trillion-dollar reserves like you have in gold.

• 9:33David Hoffman?

  So, your take then, Mike, is that the Trump administration is not intentionally eroding your Treasuries as the world reserve asset? But that may be happening despite whatever their intent is. Right? Or actually, maybe I want to ask you about that.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, there's always been a really hard balancing act. Bob Rubin, when he was Secretary of Treasury, "I believe in the strong dollar." I think Scott Bessin would say, "I believe in the strong dollar." But cyclically, they'd like the dollar to weaken.

• 9:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Right? And so, how do you, how do you talk out of both sides of your mouth and actually be authentic? Right? Is being honest. It's like, "Hey, cyclically, we're a little too strong, but broadly, we believe in the strong dollar." Listen, when the dollar weakens, me and you, as Americans, get poorer. Our trip to Europe costs more. Our Italian couch costs more, our Mercedes costs more, therefore we're poorer.

• 10:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but isn't the argument, though, that, you know, when you talk about we're poor, right, it's all the people that can go to Europe and, you know, like buy, you like fancy couches and such, right? Isn't the argument for a weaker dollar that, hey, like, we lost US manufacturing in this country, in order to get it back, we have to rebalance our trade deficit with the rest of the world? And because you have things like the Triffin dilemma, right, you can't, you can't be the global reserve asset and then also have, you know, like, high dollar and expect US manufacturing to stay in America. It's going to be just exported on the, on the strong dollar.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, listen, Trump is admirably trying to bring some manufacturing back, and we will bring some back. But it is the definition of insanity to think you're going to take 30 years of building supply chains overseas and snap your fingers and have them come back. Just period end of story. Like, some of the stuff you can't even get, right? It's like, oh, I want to mine lithium here. Well, it's not here, it's over in other places, right? It's in Argentina and Chile and supply chains, you know, that are labor intensive. 30% is not enough. Think about this, to be in the top 1% of the world income earners, it's about 60, 55K, right? That's our per capita, that's our median income. That means

• 11:39Speaker 01

  the median worker in America is a 1 percenter in the rest of the world. That's a big wage gap difference. And so, I don't know, 30% difference between a Vietnamese cost and an American, still not enough to move tennis shoe manufacturing back here to America, until you can do it all robotically, and that doesn't hire people, anyway.

• 11:59David Hoffman?

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• 13:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  The reason why the treasuries as the world reserve asset is such an important question, I think at this juncture, we can kind of see at the edges, maybe it's fraying, is because that has basically been the last decade of the crypto trade, right? We're watching sort of crypto emerge, Bitcoin in particular, as a new world reserve asset. That's the entire thesis. And so if treasuries are eroding, like what's after treasuries as the world reserve asset? Do you think this is the decade?

• 14:15Speaker 01

  If you looked at history, it would be the renminbi.

• 14:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Like, you know, we've been the reserve asset a long time. Roughly, people keep that title 80 years. We pushed R80. You're the reserve currency of the world when you control the seas. Period. He who has the strongest navy is the reserve currency. Traditionally. Now, the seas might not be as important anymore because we can transport shit all lots of different ways. But if you provide safety and security to the world, if you have a legal system the world trusts, you become the reserve currency. And so, we spend 3.5% of GDP out of military. It used to be 5% when most countries spent a half a percent to 1.5%. So, it wasn't free to be the reserve currency, but it had huge benefits. And the Trump administration doesn't see that as clearly.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Right? Getting out of NATO, or, you know, by definition, weakening NATO, some of the economic agreements. You know, the global network that got created after World War II, we are retreating from.

• 15:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  I don't know if you've ever read Russell Napier, his take on this. He's like a Scottish monetary historian. His take is basically as the US reserves, as any treasuries, roads as world reserve asset, what could take its place is basically not fully the renminbi, but we'll have kind of two blocks, right? So, we'll have treasuries and sort of the US and allies kind of block, and they still primarily use that as the reserve, their reserve asset. And then we'll also have renminbi in the kind of Chinese block. But in the Chinese block, they'll probably back the renminbi with gold because historically, you know, China does not. Renminbi is not used as a store of value. I mean, people do payments in renminbi, but they're not going to store their value in it.

• 16:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you think of that idea that we could bifurcate into kind of few assets?

• 16:05Speaker 01

  I think you're going to see BRICS issue a stable coin that's semi-backed by gold.

• 16:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Stable coin? Interesting. Backed by gold?

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Yep. Not fully backed by gold, but having some part of gold in the reserves. That I think you're going to see. It's a just a, it's a guess. I don't think a country that's big and powerful doesn't back their currency by anything. Now, they could say, hey, we have reserves, we're a wealthy country, and so that's by definition, you could say everything's backed by, by the assets of your country, the tax paying ability, the tax, the tax collecting ability. But every country should be AAA in its own currency, right? You can print as much of it as you want. You're not going to default on local currency debt. Are you going to lend money across border? I, are you going to store money in that currency debt? Are you getting paid enough for it? And the only one that would have a chance right now would be the renminbi.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  I don't think it's going to be, right? They haven't done enough to get people to trust them. And so I don't think the dollar loses its reserve currency, but I think it loses its luster and allows other people to say, you know, I don't trust the dollar as much. Therefore, give me some Bitcoin and gold. I've been talking Bitcoin and gold for four years now.

• 17:17David Hoffman?

  Four?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  I got, I got my own podcast, more than that. I got my own podcast and I got gold coins.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  We give everyone a gold coin and I started giving them away a 1600. I was like, don't you dare sell these gold coins. It's gonna be worth $3,000 one day soon. Now I'm like, it's gonna be worth $10,000. Now I gotta change where the gold is hidden because one of your

• 17:41David Hoffman?

  Doxture goals.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Steal the 50 ounces of gold that's in my drawer.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  But yeah, I, I think that narrative is pretty strong right now.

• 17:49David Hoffman?

  I'm like, I want to turn to more domestic concerns. And I mean that inside of our own stock market, but also with your company, Galaxy. So recently on, on May 16th, Galaxy was listed on the NASDAQ. Congratulations about that. Rumor is it took you over 1,300 days to get that over the hump when it just should have taken 90? Tell us about that journey. Was that frustrating that it took so goddamn long?

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, listen, we, we, it took us a little longer to get ready than we thought. And we missed the window with Jay Clayton and, and the, the old Trump administration was in power. And Coinbase got through and a few miners got through. And then we ran into the, the hard no hand of Gary Gensler and his SEC.

• 18:34David Hoffman?

  How hard did you try or did you just know like, oh, he's never gonna allow us through?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  No, we thought, I was, I, I am on record thinking, I thought Gensler would be a great SEC chair for crypto.

• 18:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think we do.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  He is wickedly smart. He seemed to be embracing it and he about faced it. And I have to believe there's something to do with Elizabeth Warren, who was his Sherpa and the small cadre that said, let's focus on all the bad things and not the good things about crypto. And you wanna focus on the bad things about anything, you can, right? And there were plenty of bad things about crypto. We had lots of scams, scams and scandals. And so, listen, Sam Bankman Fried probably set us back 18 months to two years. Getting people to trust us. It's really ironic because most of us got into crypto because this was Going from having to trust a government to trusting cryptography, right? Blockchains are trust machines.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  But a lot of us miss the concept that you've got to first teach people to trust the trust machine.

• 19:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Ah, it just sounds like hocus pocus and scams. And so I'm happy to say we now are at a point where both Republicans and Democrats, not all of them, but enough of them, get it. Like, I'm really proud that Senator Warner and Senator Gallegos, you know, kept the center together on this genius bill. They had a big fling from the left, right? Because Elizabeth Warren, even though she had retreated a little bit, once she saw the Trump family getting engaged, she had her entry, you know, angle. She was like, there it goes again, crypto being used to enrich these people. That's not fair. Let's sabotage all the crypto. And these guys fought back. And it's not easy to do in a world as polarized as this.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  It is shockingly optimistic that in a Congress as polarized as this one is, we had bipartisan cooperation on the stablecoin bill. And I think it's going to be a lot harder on the market structure bill, not because of left-right divide, because of inter-crypto divide, right? Should Coinbase be able to both custody, have a broker-dealer, and run an exchange? Can't do that in TradeFi, but is it okay in crypto? Well, if you're Coinbase, you say yes. And if you're not one of those Coinbase competitors, you say no. You know, like, and so it's, everyone starts pushing their own agenda. And there's a lot more at stake in the market structure bill than I think there has been

• 21:06Speaker 01

  in the stablecoin bill.

• 21:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so there's like two bills Congress is batting around that would be like crypto bills. The first is the Genius Act, the stablecoin bill.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  And that's broadly done.

• 21:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right, right, right. And the second is the market structure. So the Genius Act, let's talk about that for a minute. I'd love your take on like, what's going on there? So just earlier this week, at the time of recording, there was a vote in the Senate. I believe it won majority, 60-something senators.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Sixty nine senators.

• 21:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, sixty nine senators.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  It was sixty seven, but a couple of guys joined on things.

• 21:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, and they voted yes, but they voted yes to actually hear the bill. So there's multiple rounds of voting that this bill is going to need. We got overwhelming support that the bill can be put up for vote, basically. That vote has not yet happened. That's going to happen sometime after Memorial Day, I believe. And is it like your expectation that we've got the votes? It's gonna pass?

• 21:59Speaker 01

  It's done with the, it would take a really surprising lightning bolt from somewhere we're not seeing to sink it. It is broadly done.

• 22:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  So it's done?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  You can ninety nine percent it, it's in the can.

• 22:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's done ninety nine percent. And that's good that it's coming from the Senate, because it's hard to get things through the Senate versus the House. It has to be kicked back to the House and voted on there, of course, right? And the whole kind of like legislative process that would go through. But the Senate was the hard one. So what's the difference between basically the Senate a year ago and the Senate of today? I think we're pretty clear on the Republican side, but.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Why we are set up as a crypto industry well is Democrats realized too late in the election. They should have listened to yours truly, at least in this one quote, which I stole from someone else, by the way. Whoever gave that quote on Twitter the first time or on X, thank you. But it was, there are more people that own crypto in America than own dogs. And I at least amplified that. The guy stole credit. I was like, listen, and the Democratic Party had become the party against dogs. I was like, guys, what are you doing? Crypto was beloved by so many people. Like, it should be a bipartisan technology, not a political weapon.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  And the Dems got it late, and they tried to scramble, and they were so scared of their own shadows. And Elizabeth Warren had held hostage this party. They got angry at her. Let me tell you, everyone was angry at her by the end. And all of a sudden, you have Bernie Moreno upset, you know, what had been a stalwart, you know, Democratic senator in Ohio. You had Trump raise tremendous amounts of money from the crypto community. The crypto community and the tech community became synonymous almost, and they all shifted to the right. And so if you looked at the aftermath of the election and you sat with Dems, which I did, they all thought, oh, crypto actually might have cost us the election. And so. They don't want to make that mistake again.

• 24:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  The smart people are like, we want to get crypto off the agenda. We're not probably going to win it, but if we pass these two bills, there's nothing to talk about.

• 24:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so are you saying the Democratic Party doesn't hate dogs anymore? I mean, is the anti-crypto army, are they gone?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is it over for them?

• 24:18Speaker 01

  The anti, listen, again, you go to DC, walk down the block, pick someone out and ask them what a block Shane wasn't, is and have them explain it. I'll ask you guys, how many crypto apps do you have on your phone? Oh, God.

• 24:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm the wrong person to ask.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  But your apps only really let you buy and sell in price. They don't let you buy tickets. They don't let you take an Uber. They don't let you do anything that the common American would do.

• 24:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  And so crypto was a speculative casino for most Americans. That was it. And so the politicians are like, eh. And we now, as an industry, need to actually see it live out its, live out its potential. We need to see decentralized systems get built. We need to see tokenization of lots of assets. And we're going to see, and I think we are going to see your bank account and checking account and, you know, equity, you know, brokerage account start showing up as wallets. Like, as that transition gets done, we have an industry that provides utility to the American public, right? Right now, we all said, oh, how important we are.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Again, if I had one more speech about what an important industry we are, I'm like, do something fricking important. Listen, Bitcoin has been wildly important. Check the box, but we're not a Bitcoin industry, right? We're a digital asset cryptocurrency industry. And other than Bitcoin and stable coins for offshore people, like, when's the last time you bought something with a stable coin?

• 25:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  All the time.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Do you?

• 25:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  All right, you guys are junkies.

• 25:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we're buying, to be clear, we're mostly buying crypto assets.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 25:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm not buying my groceries.

• 25:56David Hoffman?

  Capital formation and stablecoins is like $90.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  That's it. So we haven't taken our industry anywhere that most people care about other than gambling or investing.

• 26:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, because they wouldn't let us.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  I know that. I know that.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  This is our great opportunity. We now have blockchains that are fast enough, and we have a regulatory environment that is loose enough and is going to be clear enough. Right? Those are two different things, but very important, right? This new SEC is really welcoming. The old SEC never was even in the office, and they were very unwelcome, right? They were persecuting us and prosecuting us. This new SEC is embracing us, and that is going to allow, I think, a outburst of innovation and people trying really cool things.

• 26:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, I want to, we want to get your takes on the SEC in a minute, but just to tie off the Genius Act really quick, okay? So like, I haven't gone through the Genius Act with a fine-tooth comb for a couple of reasons. One, it was just like, I wasn't sure it was going to pass, right? And so like, why do the work until you guys?

• 26:57Speaker 01

  He's going to call me, I would have told you.

• 26:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, okay. So now, now we know it's passing. Can you give us the TLDR of like, what it does? So we have $250 billion worth of stablecoins right now on-chain, okay? Besen was talking about the potential for $2 trillion. I saw him give testimony in Congress. What does the Genius Act actually do? And is this opening the floodgates for America's onboarding of the rest of the world into crypto and into dollars? I mean, how big could this get?

• 27:29Speaker 01

  It could get really big. So, look, what, we need the payment guys to get engaged, right? So you go to McDonald's right now, we just use this with the, you know, Apple Pay. Imagine you could do this with, with your stablecoin.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Right? What does that take? It takes Stripe that connects to all these people. Visa, MasterCard, all these payment guys are gonna be part of... Like, who's gonna be the winner of stablecoins? I don't know, but I bet you Stripe, Visa, MasterCard are in the pot. And so, there's an onboarding. Why is this important? Because Besson and everyone else there says 35 trillion we need to fund. We want people that hold their digital money in dollars, not in MMB. Quite frankly, not in Bitcoin. We would approve that the dollar's worthy of it. And so, part of this is to get overseas money, right? You need every overseas dollar you can, fund the deficit. What's exciting is, once it's legitimized, real companies can then use it, without worrying about, "Am I gonna get in trouble?"

• 28:29Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of the difference between the different bills were, "How long are you gonna give Tether to get compliant in the US? Is it two years, three years, 18 months?" Right, there was a tether back and forth. And I literally was down there, I was like, "Guys, clip a coin, cuz it doesn't matter." It's gonna take a couple of years for this thing to kinda get implemented anyway. And the Tether guys are really smart. They will figure out a way if it's two years or if it's three years. But so, that was a push. There was a push to keep Facebook and X and the social media platforms out. I think the banks are scared already. The community banks are petrified. And it's the same rationale that they don't let Walmart open a bank, right? For years, Walmart said, "We should open a bank." And then they're like, "Okay, every person in the world's gonna bank at Walmart."

• 29:14Speaker 01

  And so, the non-financial players got pushed out of the stablecoin game. For now, I'm sure Meta's not happy.

• 29:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  I didn't know that. So, if you're Meta, or X, or Big Tech, basically, you can't play in the stablecoin game?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  No, you can't issue your own.

• 29:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can't issue your own, but you can adopt someone else's?

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Yes. And so, listen, they're still gonna be huge parts of having money move around the system. We have never even seen Internet of Things yet, because no corporate companies wanna do something unregulated, right? And so, now you're gonna start even having micropayments at one point in Internet of Things. And so... They also, another one of the big fights was, should we allow an interest-bearing stablecoin? And that was a categoric no from banking, right? Think about it, an interest-bearing stablecoin creates a bank run really fast. And the community banks are worried. If there's one thing that could still untrack this bill that I said is 99%, is like, I know the community banks are banging the phones right now because they're worried they're gonna lose deposits.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  And are there gonna be workarounds on the interest, right? Can State Street issue a money market fund, which is legal, security, right? But also issue a stablecoin and just tell all their users, keep the money market fund in your wallet. Whenever you want to buy or sell something, we'll do an instant transaction from the one to the other, and then you can buy it. Well, now you have two potential assets that flip back and forth. Feels a lot like interest-bearing. Right? Again, I haven't talked to State Street. I made them up as a hypothetical. And so I don't want people thinking that's a product in the works, right? Chad Pascarella already has an interest-bearing stablecoin offshore. And so these are gonna be marketing like, you know, some ways, just like everyone has an ETF, everyone's gonna have a stablecoin.

• 30:59David Hoffman?

  Where all of these stablecoins being tokenized is also like a point of attention here. And I know it's interesting, perhaps slightly ironic, that Galaxy is going live on the NASDAQ. And why do you want to go live on the NASDAQ? Why do you want to trade on the NASDAQ? Because the United States is the capital center of planet Earth. But also, as we are watching this unfortunate bond market sale, Treasury sale today, people are not interested in the United States as the capital center of the world as much as they were. Our bonds are, capital is fleeing the United States. And it's going, it's going elsewhere. One of those places it's going is onto the internet, onto perhaps the new epicenter of internet capital markets is where all these stablecoins that we're talking about are being tokenized.

• 31:43David Hoffman?

  And that's on the Ethereum Layer 1. And so if the NASDAQ, or if the United States financial epicenter doesn't have that same grasp as much as it once does, my question to you, Mike, is when are you going to to tokenize Galaxy assets on Ethereum?

• 31:58Speaker 01

  As soon as we can. We are working with the SEC right now, to be fair, potentially tokenizing Galaxy stock in the near future as at least a first step. I think you're going to start seeing lots of innovation around tokenized equities. You're going to see equity perps. I think you're gonna, like, this new SEC is saying, try stuff. And so people have a lot more courage that they're not going to get prosecuted or persecuted. Yeah, how's it been working with them? Has it been productive? Wildly productive. I mean, it's night and day. You can't compare. And so I think that's going to be the excitement of the second half of the year. And it might not be till next year where people make any money off of it, right? You gotta figure. And it's not even clear where the money's going to get made yet. Like, you know, but it's going to create more activity on blockchains.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  I was at a dinner last night with 10 really smart and prominent guys in the field. And there was a wide ranging discussion. And you realize why this market structure was going to be hard. You know, what blockchain should you be allowed to issue a stablecoin on? If it's just my database, is that good enough? Is it, how decentralized does it have to be? I didn't realize I need to look at this, but the, one of the big multinational European organizations apparently came out with some rules already for themselves that made sense to everyone at the table that I haven't read. But is it, you can pick your, is Tron fine for stablecoins? Is Ripple, does that have to be Ethereum, right? Is the government, should the government pick what blockchain's a stablecoin should be able to run on?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Or is it MyAirBEAR, you know, safety, security? All of that stuff brings a lot of passion. And so I don't think we've fleshed out this all the way yet, but we will.

• 33:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  I was talking to, David and I were talking on our weekly episode last week about, and I told him, hey, David, you know, one thing I'm bullish on, this will surprise you, is I said I'm bullish on the SEC. Like, and I have not said this over the last, like, four years. Obviously, it's been the complete opposite. And the reason is, is not just because Gensler is gone, but it actually feels like this new SEC with Hester Purce actually getting the ability to kind of accomplish things. And Paul Atkins, the things that they're tweeting, that the speeches that I'm reading, they seem like they... Paul Atkins compared typical markets to the fax machine and crypto markets and blockchain to the internet. And he said, "We need to have tokenized security on this new technology of the internet."

• 34:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  It almost feels like the SEC, at least in speech, is promoting crypto and pushing securities towards it. Now, I don't know what the difference between what they're saying and what you're actually seeing in working with them, but do you think it's possible that we have a complete roadmap from the SEC sometime in the next year or two of how to bring securities and US equities on-chain to blockchains and we're able to do more than just tokenize Galaxy, but just have an entire marketplace and ecosystem on-chain?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Listen, I mean, think about how fast something like Hyperliquid grew, right? For perps. Or Uniswap, if Uniswap got to the point where it felt like the more business that the owners of the tokens actually got a portion of the business, right? So it felt more security-like. Why wouldn't more liquidity move there to start with? And so I first think you're going to see just liquidity move, right? The moment Apple's stock is tokenized, you're going to see liquidity 24 hours a day on Apple. You're going to be able to see people that never had access to buy it, buy it. And so it's going to happen slow for a while, and then it's going to happen fast. One of the things that no one's done yet, and this I need to say because every tokenized project so far has a backup.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  At one point, you get the efficiency gains by not doing it on Ledger just in case, by doing it just on the blockchain. And I don't know when the time for that jump is. I think when that happens, you really see the Cambrian explosion.

• 35:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  And to be clear, the thing that's preventing tokenized securities right now is that we need a market structure bill first, and also we need the blessing of the SEC. We need both of those things.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Yes, we need both. And then you need to know where they're allowed to trade. Right now, they need to trade at things called ATSs, right? Regulated ATSs, there are like two. Republic Crypto owns one, or at least they were buying one, like you haven't heard of. The NASDAQ couldn't until they changed the rules. Now, the SEC is already talking about changing the rules pretty quickly. And so we're not there yet, but we're really close.

• 36:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think so? Galaxy, having been listed on the NASDAQ, do you think we see more of these this year? Is this kind of the

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  The year where we see some crypto IPOs?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  I think you're gonna see a lineup of crypto IPOs.

• 36:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right. Like, what are some names? I mean, Circle's been floated out there. What else we got?

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Kraken's been floated out there. You know, I name a crypto company and they're thinking about it.

• 36:45David Hoffman?

  Do you think like five by the end of the year? 10?

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Yes. I think at least five more.

• 36:50David Hoffman?

  At least five more by this, the end of this year.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  And what?

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Watchday.com has been thinking, I mean, like, you know, like lots of companies.

• 36:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  It feels like that that would further legitimize like crypto, right? Because then you get Wall Street coverage, they can kind of like buy, right? Even things like Coinbase getting an S and P in the last couple of weeks. That's huge legitimacy for for crypto and makes this thing unstoppable. Is that right in the money?

• 37:15Speaker 01

  We are much more legitimized today than we were. And the crypto community hates to hear this. What will really legitimize us is to go from being a casino to be becoming a service provider. Like, again, I want to have crypto apps beyond buying and staking and selling. I economic app on my phone. And like in the US, we don't even have payments. So you think about what crypto's contribution so far to the common man. It's Bitcoin to store money in, or other currencies act like Bitcoin. And stable coins overseas. Cross border payments are a big deal in Latin America with with stable coins. We've invested in three or four venture companies that are making lots of money doing it. So I'm not, I'm not discounting what's gotten done. But we need the aha moment where everyday Americans say, hey, I got this.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  And we haven't had it yet. It might be tokenized equities.

• 38:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about the story with TradFi saturation? So you mentioned earlier when we were talking like, hey, we're trying to roll the snowball uphill. But then Larry Fink comes aboard and like, it's basically all, you know, we just get gravity on our side now. Is TradFi pretty much convinced now, the institutions, are they all in on crypto? Or like, what, what, what additional like gates do we have to go through to convince them that crypto blockchain is the future here?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  They are a lot more convinced than they were, period. And they go slow. To some degree, it's not unfair. Like even now, our markets aren't big enough. To drive like the CEO of Bank of America to worry about it, right? What I think the first thing that will get everyone freaked out about is tokenized stocks. When you start seeing like their babies tokenized and trading and growing, then every asset manager say, what am I going to do? I gotta go from like old school to new school. But I don't think it's going to be Bitcoin like Bitcoin, even if it keeps trading. Okay, it'll be just like gold. They have gold on their desk. Gold's not a big part of anyone's business, right?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Think about it, they all have a gold desk. All right, it's one out of 50 desks, right? And so it really has to go broader than just an asset.

• 39:16David Hoffman?

  Mike, there's something that I want to ask about that I don't think that I've heard be discussed out of a Galaxy. And that is the settlement in March for the Terra Luna case. Yeah, so the quick news is like there's a $200 million fine for Galaxy for, I believe, I don't know what the legal term is, but it was talking about Luna in theory, supporting Luna while also selling Luna on the other side of things. And of course you have your famous Luna tattoo. I don't know if you still have the Luna tattoo.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  I will die with that tattoo.

• 39:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so get us into the shoes of Mike Novogratz and inside of Galaxy during all of this. Like what were your lessons learned? What was the internal discussion?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Sure. So full disclosure, when you have a settlement with any agency, certainly with the New York AG, but any agency, you sign a what's called an AOD where you don't admit to what they said or deny what they said.

• 40:12David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  And so we really don't have that much capacity to talk about this.

• 40:16David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  I would say, well, we got a call. It was not a nice call.

• 40:19David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  You're surprised. This had happened a long time ago. And it couldn't have happened at a worse time in that I saw this new administration offering such clean running ahead of us. I also knew we wanted to go public. Yeah, we just listed at one point, we might or might not raise capital with the kind of bankers that will only bank you if you got a clean bill of health. We've had a data center business with a huge borrowing footprint. And so what I just thought about it, for all the reasons that were kind of overriding my wrestler's instinct to fight, it just made all the sense in the world to put it behind us and move on. And I tell you what. The good thing about being a trader is you're like a goldfish. Bad trade, move on.

• 41:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  And so I haven't really thought about that. And it was not a, it was not a small settlement. It was a painful one. I hadn't thought about it since the, like, two days afterwards. And, you know, I think our, our mantra was not talk about it. Drive on, cost of doing business in New York and move on in life.

• 41:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think one of the lessons learned for the rest of the crypto industry is like, holy shit, how dangerous are algorithmic stablecoins, right? They can get away from you in a hurry. And actually, I imagine something-

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Well, that's a different conversation.

• 41:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  There are plenty of ecosystems, and I've been talking about this in this market structure, but we need to be very careful how we label things. I never thought that algorithmic stablecoin should become a stablecoin, right? And then we did, you know, there was a run on the bank and that, that's what in part took that ecosystem down. Nomenclature is really important. Think back when Celsius and BlockFi and, and Voyager were around. I'm sure they had disclosure, but most people thought they were leaving deposits and deposits in everyone's mind are guaranteed.

• 42:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hundred percent, yeah.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Not, they were investing in a very levered hedge fund that had an asset liability mismatch. And so what I would love to see come out of DC is a much shorter form, but punchier disclosure around what the product actually offers. Right? When's the last time you read a disclosure on anything?

• 42:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Never.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  It's the worst. None of those do. But what about, like, just like on the cigarette label, this might cause cancer, right? Really simple. This is guaranteed by the government or it's not. Right? You are taking our credit risk or you're not. Like, there, there should be a disclosure for dummies. And in our industry especially, because we have a lot of new people that hadn't been seasoned investors, we have a lot of hype. And so I know Paul Atkins is all about disclosure. What I would pitch to him if I was sitting here right now is to to make it disclosure for dummies.

• 43:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is any of this part of the genius act? Is like, does the genius act define a stablecoin as, hey, it has to be backed by full reserve? You know, treasury, something like that. It can't be something like Terra Luna.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Yes, it does. It, I don't have the exact details. I believe it's 40 day N N T bills and or, you know, US dollar deposits at a Fed Bank.

• 43:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  That'll help. I think that'll help clean up like standards and nomenclature for this, right? And it's almost, it's almost nice. We have that back in 2022, like pre some of this legislation. More on Galaxy. You guys are doing some cool things with kind of the convergence between crypto and AI. So I actually hadn't been following this super closely, but realized this in prep for the conversation. You guys purchased a Bitcoin mining facility in Texas as a, you know, 160 acre Helios facility in December 2022. And now, Mike, it looks like Galaxy is sort of rigging this to actually serve the AI industry and setting it up for kind of an AI cloud. I'm curious what your plans are with that. And you see more of this in the future, sort of Bitcoin mining facilities.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  You can now think of Galaxy as a holding company with two separate businesses that are one is our crypto business, which we've talked about. The other is a data center business. We already have a lease sign and an option on a similar lease that will bring in $14 billion of rent over the next 15 years. That's just on three quarters of the current data center. And so a monstrous business. That's about a $6 billion construction project on our side and another six to eight billion on Corweave's side, filling it with ships and all the equipment. So it's a $14 billion capex project, which will be built in two years in Texas.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  I'm having dinner with the contractor tonight and he was making, he sent a nice email saying, I really wanted to make sure you make the dinner because there are other people, I really want to meet you. I was like, dude, you're the most important person in my life. He say a Hail Mary and an Alpha Father every day, that damn it, you build on time and on cost. And so that's a big business like this. What has been helpful to me to start understanding the scale? Like if we would build out our full data center, which is 800 megawatts now, but we think we could get 1.6 billion more. So it would be 2.6 gigawatts, which would be maybe the largest or one of the three largest data centers in America. Wow. It's in the middle of nowhere, right? It would be a $70 billion capex project. Think about $70 billion, that's the GDP of Uruguay,

• 45:32Speaker 01

  to make a, to make a big brain. And so what it has taught me viscerally is that the bet that Microsoft and Google and, and OpenAI and Tesla and all of them, Amazon are making on an AI future is staggering. And we should start thinking in almost nonlinear terms, which our brains aren't used to, right? When, well, think of the car your parents drove and the car you drove. They're not that different. Not that different. And is it two times better? Maybe. Maybe? Yeah. What would it be if it was 400 times better?

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Spaceship, yeah, yeah. We are gonna grow with that kind of asymptotic. Our brains aren't used to 400 times better, right? And so it's a brave new world to be cheeky, right? I'll just talk like, and you know, you've heard those lectures. When you actually see the money that people are willing to spend to build, you're like, oh God, this is real. So it has made it very real for me and it's a great business. Like it's a great business because it's predictable. Listen, there's risk to it. We gotta build on time. We gotta deliver. We've got to run a good data center. But we've become a realtor. And so having lived in a, the other half of my balance sheet

• 46:54Speaker 01

  in a 75 vol world for the last, you know, umpteen years, it will be nice to have steady high cash flow on one hand and a crypto business on the other. And the crypto business, it's a good business with lots of options on the future to become a great business. Like we don't know how tokenization is going to play out or where the value in that space is going to come. We just don't yet. We all know, or at least think Bitcoin is going to go higher. So you own a bunch of Bitcoin, but. I would have never done this just to be a gold bucket shop, right? For me, the joy of crypto is can we create a decentralized revolution?

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Can we tokenize everything and provide kind of a democracy of finance and money? And we're right there at the starting line there.

• 47:43David Hoffman?

  When it comes to the just future of our two industries, AI and crypto, you know, crypto started in data centers, right? It started with Bitcoin miners who professionalized. And that was the first big business in crypto. And you're seeing a parallel path with AI, like the root of it is data centers.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  It's a weird historical bit of luck that.

• 48:04David Hoffman?

  So you think it's luck, not a destiny of the future that our industries are like intertwined in some way? Or is it just a coincidence?

• 48:11Speaker 01

  There's gonna be part of it is, but the data center thing was luck.

• 48:14David Hoffman?

  That was luck.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Like Bitcoin miners had great ambition, as did we. And it used so much electricity, we were the only guys that owned giant swaths of electricity, right? People ask me all the time, why aren't all the other big data center businesses in this business? They didn't own the electricity. Like when I started looking into this, we already have one of the biggest data centers in the world. At 800, like it's, no one built these giant data centers before. And so it's who had the contracts for the electricity.

• 48:46David Hoffman?

  So you don't think that there's any sort of intertwine between the capabilities of AI and blockchain tech?

• 48:51Speaker 01

  There will be, listen, listen, you know, blockchains are decentralizers and AI is the great centralizer. And so that's got to have a little bit of push-pull, right? Authentication, your AI agents are going to buy your groceries over some rails. I would guess they're crypto rails. We've invested in our venture business and a bunch of different people that want to be those rails and use their coin to be the one that transports your stablecoin. Are their blockchain specifically built for AI? And so I do think you'll see a lot of synergies between AI and the crypto world. I think the data center business happened because we owned a bunch of electricity.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Right? And so I don't want to conflate those two, but it's a beautiful story. I try to conflate them and we learn from it. Like when you're around. The tenants, right? Who's running these data centers? Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, you know, Tesla, the guys that are building AI. Like, it puts you more in that conversation. Not that you're picking up the phone and calling Jeff Bezos and saying, "Will you?" But intellectually and emotionally puts you more in that conversation.

• 50:03David Hoffman?

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• 50:45David Hoffman?

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• 51:30David Hoffman?

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• 52:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think the data, the data center business is like really fascinating. It's very physical, but like 10 years ago, I would have thought of data centers more as kind of commodity. And now they're becoming like, almost like geopolitical in terms of importance, right? Because of this AI space race between just, you know, the US and China. And so now it's all about, can we build and scale data centers like faster than say China or adversaries? And can we get access to energy at a faster rate? I'm curious because you're doing this.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  I'm the guy from the UAE.

• 52:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  How hard is it to build in the US?

• 52:33Speaker 01

  There's, down in Texas, it's not, which is why like a lot of these data centers are going to be in Texas. Hook 'em horns. The, there was a guy from the UAE who was in their, you know, data center business. And he was quoting one of the top three brothers, Sheikh Tawoon. And he said, he said, you know, Einstein said equals MC squared, but now E equals I. Energy equals intelligence.

• 53:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  The more power, the more brain. And, and I'm seeing that. Like there is an insatiable demand for power today because that creates the brain. And so who knows how long it lasts? I saw a great interview with Zuckerberg, who said, almost everything he's ever seen in his life, you can see where it goes, where the asymptote bends. And he said, in this one, I can't, it just keeps, it looks like it goes straight up. Doesn't mean it always will, but that was like, you know, Mark's a pretty smart guy. And that was his moment in time decision. We see a bull market in this stuff, at least for the next three to four years.

• 53:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do you think we can, the US can, is positioned to stay ahead of China on this? On both energy and data?

• 53:41Speaker 01

  I'm the wrong expert to ask. I would never want to short the US. You know, we, we do a lot of dumb things, but we always seem to figure it out. And I was reading recently, 36% of our Nobel prizes in the scientists came from immigrants. And so I, I tweeted that at first I got half the MAGA people telling me I was a, you know, horrible guy. 50% of the Fortune 500, I'm sorry, 50% of unicorn CEOs were immigrants, 50%. And so as long as we keep the pipeline of smart, as long as I was at Yale's graduation this weekend, my son graduated, shout out Nacho, as long as we don't try to devastate our great institutes of learning because it becomes politically convenient, I think we're going to win the AI race.

• 54:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  Mike, as we close this out, I think you've approaching or you have surpassed a decade in crypto and certainly a huge moment for you, ring the NASDAQ bell for a crypto company. What's next, man? What's like the next big climb?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  You know what? I have been one of the most blessed guys in terms of finance. I was a partner when Goldman went public. I helped ring the bell when Fortress went public and I rang the bell with Galaxy. So three finance IPOs on my lapel. My wife said, "Don't get greedy." Listen, I think we've got a nice chapter to build here at Galaxy. And, you know, maybe I'll lift my head up in three or four years and I'm 60. I've always thought I'd work to 75. So I got 15 years. Will it all be at Galaxy? I don't know. But at least the next three or four years, I see clear.

• 55:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I don't know. 15 years, it feels like you can do another IPO somewhere.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  You know, it's kind of in the back of my head.

• 55:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. And like, we're very excited about this next run of the bull run. We still got a bull run coming, right? It's not over yet for crypto?

• 55:33Speaker 01

  The bull run is just starting today.

• 55:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah? You got price targets?

• 55:37Speaker 01

  I mean, listen, we need to finish this week over 10750, you know, 107500. If we do, if Sunday night, we're at 108, 109, you're going to be at 130 before you can bat an eye.

• 55:49David Hoffman?

  Mike, I think my first memory of you is first getting into crypto in 2017 and hearing you chant the chant, "The herd is coming, the herd is coming." How does it feel?

• 56:01Speaker 01

  I was barely.

• 56:02David Hoffman?

  You were, hey, as promised, it does feel like the herd is here at the gate.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Finally.

• 56:07David Hoffman?

  How does that feel?

• 56:08Speaker 01

  You know? Well, we went public at Fortress. It was joyous. There were five of us. We were the first company where five guys became a billionaire in a day. Actually, the only company in history, even including up to today, where five guys became a billionaire in a day. It was joyful. And Corey and we've got close. I think they had three. This time, I was shocked how emotional I was. Like, I almost cried on CNBC, which I would have shot myself for since I teased the Latin for crying on CNBC. Ah, you know, you don't cry in baseball. And I kept thinking why I was so emotional. And I think some of it is, you know, we were looked at as drug dealers at one point.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Like, our industry has gone through hell. Forget two 90% downdrafts, you know, 2018 and 2022, 90% and 70%. Being persecuted and prosecuted, I keep using those two words, going through the thing with the AG. And it just felt very emotional to ring that bell. And that surprised me. You know, I said the herd was coming. I was friggin' seven years early. And so it's not vindication. It really isn't. I don't say, oh, I'm vindicated. It's not the way my body operates. But it did feel good to have made it through the journey.

• 57:28David Hoffman?

  Well, Mike, you rode the herd. I think you led the charge of the herd in a way. And so I think many of us in the crypto industry owe a debt to your confidence and also your leadership. So we are definitely grateful having you among us, leading the charge.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.

• 57:45David Hoffman?

  Guys, thanks a ton. Thanks a lot, Mike. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. But nonetheless, we are charging forward into the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.