Brad Michelson, U.S. Senior Marketing Manager at eToro: The Current State of Marketing in Crypto

Brad Michelson is the U. S. Senior Marketing Manager at eToro. In this conversation, Brad and Anthony Pompliano discuss the current state of marketing in crypto, how people should be thinking about customer acquisition, what the inherent challenges on certain marketing platforms are, and what's coming up next for eToro. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO. COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world.

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

• 0:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Brad Michelson is the US Senior Marketing Manager at eToro. In this conversation, we discuss the current state of marketing in crypto, how people should be thinking about customer acquisition, what the inherent challenges on certain marketing platforms are, and what is coming up next for eToro. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Skrt skrt. Wanna know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right, Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal: motherf***ing mass adoption.

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and card payment. Everything you could want at Crypto.com. Go help your boy out, tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit Crypto.com. Pomp's got you, always. Everyone wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and wifi? All you gotta do is go to CoinMine.com, you buy a coin mine. It's like an Xbox or a Playstation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. That's right. You purchase it, it shows up at your doorstep, you pull it out of the box, you plug it in, connect to your wifi, five minutes or less, you're mining Bitcoin.

• 1:30Anthony Pompliano?

  All you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide, and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis. Kinda like how Tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software. Just your update in your coin mine. Consumer mining made easy. That's right. Go to CoinMine.com, tell them Pomp sent you, and thank me later. As many of you know, crypto investors store their digital assets on exchanges or in cold storage for long-term safekeeping. However, this strategy doesn't help them grow their investment holdings or build overall wealth. With the new BlockFi interest account, users can now securely store their Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest,

• 2:11Anthony Pompliano?

  paid monthly in cryptocurrency. 6% is an absurdly high rate. It's the best rate in the industry. I highly suggest you go check out blockfi.com/pomp. Again, that's blockfi.com/pomp to sign up and start earning crypto today.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:52Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Brad here. He's sitting in the hot seat. He's not leaving until he tells us all the marketing secrets. So thanks so much for coming in and doing this.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Pomp.

• 3:03Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your background? Where'd you get started? How the hell do you end up at eToro doing marketing?

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Well, I actually started as a journalist way back in the day when I was 15. Started a blog. Was mostly a music journalist. So I would shoot bands and film concerts. And that was sort of my first exposure to what I didn't even consider as marketing at the time is posting links on music forums, getting traffic. Ended up getting to the point where it was almost scalable. Ended up going to college, was an editor of college paper. But after college, I ended up pivoting into PR. So I had a little shop for a bit.

• 3:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Where'd you go to college?

• 3:49Speaker 02

  I grew up in Canada, so I went to the University of Victoria on the West Coast.

• 3:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then what was PR? What were you doing there?

• 3:57Speaker 02

  I was doing music PR as well. So by the end of it, we had about a dozen clients, Western Canadian acts that were touring the country, touring the US. And then a year and a bit into that, I ended up going to New York for a summer and then never leaving.

• 4:15Anthony Pompliano?

  What brought you to New York?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Uh, mostly for work. So, um, at the time, I thought that I'd be able to pivot from Canadian PR into US PR and who would have guessed it's not as easy as you would expect. Coming to, uh, you know, a different coast and a different city, making new contacts, that sort of thing. I ended up pivoting into, uh, copywriting and then ended up going over to, uh, my first agency I worked at. I was at a digital agency, started as an account manager and ended up climbing the ladder to director of strategy at the agency. We're mostly e-commerce clients. Um, we specialized in, um,

• 4:56Speaker 02

  post A funding startups and scaling those brands out. Um, some of those brands now are on the New York City subways, which is quite a thrill to see and, uh, it was really exciting. And, uh, from there I moved in-house and, and after that, uh, made my first professional move into crypto.

• 5:14Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the first time you ever heard about crypto?

• 5:18Speaker 02

  First time I heard about crypto was in 2012 when I was sort of just discovering Reddit in college. Um, I started reading on, I can't even remember which subreddits. People were talking about Bitcoin, buying stuff with Bitcoin. Um, but at the exact same time, actually, my little cousin, I found out had been mining for like a year at that point.

• 5:39Anthony Pompliano?

  What?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's crazy. And, um, you know, he sort of sold me on the philosophy of Bitcoin, sold me on the, you know, the, the technicals of crypto in general and why permissionless transfers of value are, are so valuable. Um, and I've sort of just been growing that as a hobby for a long time. I, uh, about a year after that, I found out there's about a dozen of my friends back home. We were all closet Bitcoin people. So we started a Slack group and I'm still in that today. We talk about market sentiment and news and and share each other's, uh, experience. Some of us are full-time crypto now, so it's really fun.

• 6:20Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome. What, um, what really like caught your eye in the beginning when you saw it, right? Cause it's so different and then obviously coming from music. What was the big, uh, the big catch there?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  I think the first thing for me was, like I sort of alluded to before is permissionless transfers of value. So the first use case that really stuck with me and honestly still is what I think about the most is remittance payments, cross-border payments, being able to transfer value from one country to another for pennies almost instantly. And what really sold me on this is I've got a friend back home, Joseph Weinberg, works on Schiff Network. I know he's been on the show before. And that was one of his first projects was a remittance project. And ever since then, it's sort of always stuck with me.

• 7:10Anthony Pompliano?

  You guys knew each other before crypto?

• 7:12Speaker 02

  We grew up together.

• 7:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow. All right. So when you decide, hey, this crypto thing's real, you know, Bitcoin's interesting, etc., what was, how did you get to Etor? What was the path?

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Wow, yeah. So I started my first crypto company, I guess, three years ago. They were post ICO and I helped them launch their platform, which was really fun. We also launched a conference that still goes on to this day during New York Blockchain Week. After that, I actually moved on to BlockFi, where I was the Director of Marketing. And I was there for a bit. And that was really fun and really formative for me. Zach's an amazing person to work for. And, you know, he really gives you the opportunity to experiment. And, you know, he gave me the opportunity to grow that brand. And now they are what they are. And that was a really fantastic experience.

• 8:05Anthony Pompliano?

  What was the best part about BlockFi? And before all the trolls on Twitter get mad, I'm an investor in BlockFi through Morgan Creek, there are advertisers on the podcast, there's all the disclosures, but they're awesome. Go sign up for an account.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  BlockFi.com/pomp.

• 8:21Anthony Pompliano?

  It works.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  It does.

• 8:22Anthony Pompliano?

  It does work, right? Actually, Brad is the one who, the very first ad we ever ran on the podcast.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 8:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Was because of Brad and BlockFi.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Sorry, what was that question?

• 8:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Just keep saying blockfi.com/palm.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 8:36Anthony Pompliano?

  But what kind of caught your attention about going to work at BlockFi? Was it the team, the product, just you wanted to like go more full time into crypto?

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What really convinced you?

• 8:47Speaker 02

  That's a great question. I mean.

• 8:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I only do, I only do great questions on the podcast.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  At that point, you know, I was two feet into wanting to take on crypto as a career. Like, I'm not a trader, so that's not really my angle. I focus on customer acquisition and growing brands, right? So what I saw with BlockFi was that here's a company that's gotten some funding from an, from a few exciting places, and this was still when we were on our seed. They're not an ICO company, which was something that I personally wanted to avoid going forward. And their product was something that I saw immediate use cases for. At the time, you know, Salt was still a relatively big name and there are other major players in the space as well.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  So that was the original draw. And then, you know, once I started talking to Zach about his vision for the long term, there's a lot of really cool things that they have in their pipeline. Obviously, we launched the BlockFi interest account last year, which has been really exciting and that's still growing rapidly. I use it myself. You guys should probably go use it as well.

• 9:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I use it too. That's not, no financial advice, but I use it as well.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Exactly. So yeah, that was a really cool experience for me and a lot of, you know, best practices setting there. And. Yeah.

• 10:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then you moved over to eToro earlier this year. What was that like?

• 10:20Speaker 02

  That was a really cool experience. So, you know, after speaking with Yoni, our CEO, and speaking with Guy, who's our MD of the US business, I was sold pretty quickly on the company. You know, we've been around for 12 years. We have 11 million users on the platform. If you go to London right now, eToro is on all the cabs. We sponsor six Premier League teams. So it was a little bit of stepping into a pedigree, which was really cool. But on top of that, you know, eToro has obvious differentiators in the market. The social trading features, the copy features, I just saw a really big opportunity in that.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  And, you know, it's like working in a startup environment because there's like 20 people in our office. But we have the infrastructure of a, you know, very large organization.

• 11:13Anthony Pompliano?

  What does eToro do? I think a lot of people see the advertising.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe we should start with that.

• 11:17Anthony Pompliano?

  What exactly does eToro do?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  All right. So eToro is a social trading platform.

• 11:24Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that? Is that some bullshit Yoni made up?

• 11:29Speaker 02

  So.

• 11:30Anthony Pompliano?

  By the way, disclosure, we are investors in eToro through Morgan Creek. Go ahead.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  So to put it most basically, we have a number of features on the platform that

• 11:45Speaker 02

  it's more than just your normal spot buy sell, right? So the most basic part of the social features are that every asset on the platform has a social feed. Globally, we have over 2,000 assets. In the US, we're crypto only right now with equities coming next year. So you click on Bitcoin, you see the social feed, people are posting market sentiment, they're posting charts. We have pretty advanced charting features on the site, you know, competes with what TradingView does, for example. But on top of that, you can click on people's profiles. You can see their entire portfolio broken down by percentages as well as. Their cost basis over time, which is really exciting. And actually.

• 12:27Anthony Pompliano?

  So this is like Twitter where people are like, oh, I'm so smart. Look at my TA. You can click on their profile and be like, you're down 40%. I would just, you know, maybe not show the charts and worry about making money instead.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. So that's a really big part of it. And we've got these copy features, which are really exciting. So a couple of weeks ago, we launched this new copy portfolio through a partnership with a company called The Thai. That I think a bunch of people probably saw on Twitter. What The Thai does is they have access through a third party to the actual fire hose of Twitter. So they ingest like 850 million tweets a day from crypto Twitter. They cut out the spam, they score the tweets, and they basically produce signals for prop traders. And they generate their yield off their trading strategies. So what we did with them is we partnered, made a light version of their signal strategy.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  And we launched that publicly for Etoro users around the world.

• 13:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And how does the copy trader functionality work?

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Right. So copy trader is sort of a parallel feature. That actually allows you to copy all the trades of other traders. And that happens automatically on your account at the exact same price that they execute at in real time. That is probably our most popular feature globally, and that's actually launching in the US on October 29th.

• 13:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so really, this is if you have an account and I think that you're smart, I want to follow you. I can say, hey, just copy what Brad does. If you own, if you're in Europe and you own Apple stock and you sell your Apple stock, then it would sell it in my portfolio as well. If you then took that money and you bought some other, I'll say Bitcoin, then it would buy Bitcoin in my account as well. It just literally mimics exactly what you're doing in real time. So I get basically the performance that you get. And so rather than give you my money to manage, I'm basically just copying what you're doing.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  That's right. That's exactly how it works with the global product. For example, you mentioned stocks. So in the US, we're crypto only right now. But, you know, once we launch on the 29th, we'll have between 50 and 60 traders available to be copied on the platform. The people who are whitelisted to be copied, those people actually get rewarded for being copied, which is really exciting. And like you said, the people copying them get the benefit of the trading strategy of the person they're copying.

• 14:55Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So before I forget, you can go to the website, etoro.com/pomp, and there's a whole bunch of stuff here around trading, etc. What's your role at Etoro?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Right. So I run US marketing for Etoro.

• 15:12Anthony Pompliano?

  What does that mean?

• 15:13Speaker 02

  So customer acquisition, brand marketing, I oversee event marketing as well as PR, anything that's sort of outward facing from a messaging or acquisition standpoint.

• 15:27Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. And as you guys look at the US market today, because you're crypto only, like, what are the channels that you're the most active on?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's a really good question. So on a social side of things, we're really act, we try to be really active on crypto Twitter, right? You know, that's sort of the holy grail. That's where we all spend most of our time. So we're developing, you know, and maturing a program to spread the word for Etoro on there. You know, at the same time, we like to leverage influencer relationships. So today, you might have seen a tweet go out from Ben Askren, who we've partnered with, which is really exciting. Earlier this year, you might have seen that we partnered with Bitcoin Is, which was founded by Russell Okung and the Chargers. So that's really exciting. And there's some more cool partnerships coming out soon.

• 16:18Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to tell us about any of them right now?

• 16:21Speaker 02

  No, I don't think I can do that.

• 16:22Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Just wondering. I thought I could get you. Go ahead.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  On top of that, you might have been hearing about eToro through a number of podcasts that we sponsor, including yours. You know, it's a big channel for a lot of people in crypto. It's been really effective for me at other companies I've worked with and it's, you know, a direct line to our lowest funnel customer.

• 16:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. So, social's big, podcasts are big, anything else that you guys have that you're active with?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we also advertise on the social platforms where we can. We buy ad space on publishers that, you know, we think our customers are on. You know, we don't really buy articles, we buy banners. I know that there's some confusion with that sometimes in crypto land, so we like to experiment a little bit with everything, but when we try something, we do a real deep dive execution on those plans.

• 17:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Cool. So I wanted to bring you in because I want to talk about just marketing in general, but specifically around crypto as well.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's go through the different channels and just kind of give me your philosophy, right, or the framework that you use to evaluate some of this. So, social and Twitter specifically, like, how do you think about what the value prop is? Like, what's the best way to actually engage there? And what do you see being effective versus not effective?

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great question. So...

• 17:51Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the third time you said that. It must be really a great question.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  You're a pro, man. So it really depends on the product, right?

• 17:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't tell Peter McCormick that. Go ahead.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  So it really depends on the product, right? So we are a trading platform. Obviously, you know, there's the key value propositions being social trading platform, great place to buy and sell.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  The basics, right? Good app, the whole deal. But then you have to think about who your customer is, where they are, what are the most effective ways to access these people? And develop your full marketing funnel, right? So you have your upper funnel where you're just trying to get fresh eyeballs. We're trying to get people into the brand, following along in one way or another. These are typically through social media, working through affiliates, banner ads, sponsoring newsletters, that sort of thing. And then you've got your medium funnel where you're engaging with, you know, your customers directly who reach out to you on social media, on the platform itself.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  You're leveraging them to promote your brand further through things like refer friend programs. You're hitting them through email marketing. There's a million different things to hit on this funnel. And then you've got sort of your lower funnel where you're worried about conversion. So we like to, we're investing quite a bit in optimizing our website funnel, our customer acquisition funnel, and just making it as smooth as possible for people during the onboarding process.

• 19:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Top of the funnel, what have you guys tried that hasn't worked? Or even if it's not an etour or specific thing, just like, what are things that you think might be a misconception in marketing? That you're like, oh, that seems to be a top of funnel thing, but it's actually not nearly as effective as people think?

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Hmm. I think that posting memes on crypto Twitter are not as effective as some people think.

• 19:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Twitter is so fleeting of a platform that, that although sometimes you're winning a little bit of mind share, you're not actually... Selling people, not selling is not the right word, but you're not endearing themselves to your brand. So sometimes that's a liability, but none of these things are like existential truths, right? Sometimes things don't work, some things do work. Sometimes an ad campaign that you put all over the subways and train stations, whatever, doesn't work in the immediate term, but it's an investment for a long-term strategy that will actually pay off 10 months later.

• 20:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  So I don't know if there's one specific thing that's straight up doesn't work. It's all contextual and it's all timely, you know?

• 20:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And do you feel like you can try to script like the customer journey where you're like, "Hey, we know we need to hit customers six or seven times with different messages on different platforms and then they convert." Are you able to kind of in the marketing plans, maybe identify or measure at that level of granularity? Or is it much more kind of, "Hey, you know, we ran banner ads on a website. This is how many people saw it, how many people clicked, and then we converted." But you can't really necessarily track back, how many other times did they see your ads and things like that? Like what level of granularity can you actually get to?

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I mean, the objective is always to get as granular as possible, even if your strategy doesn't go through all those layers of granularity, right? So yes, you want to be as involved as possible in your customer acquisition funnel. You know, you have everything from, you have everything from retargeting banners that start serving the day of or the day after someone hits your website. You have, you know, drip campaigns coming from email campaigns when someone becomes a lead or becomes a funded customer. So for those things, you want to be as granular as possible because there's a million opportunities to optimize.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  But sometimes, you know, there is such thing as being too granular because the program becomes too complex. So in order to A/B test or optimize those programs in the long term, it needs to be like a manageable size, right? So if you have...

• 22:22Speaker 02

  An email drip campaign that's 25 steps deep, that's way too many because you're going to be testing buttons and call to actions and wording and graphics on 25 different emails simultaneously. And you need, you know, a full team of people to do that sort of thing. When you're talking about the sort of campaigns that you can be a little bit more high level on, there's a lot of opportunities for that stuff. So when you're doing podcast advertising, for example, these are investments in a brand, right? These aren't direct response activations. So you come up with some ad copy, some talking points, you let those run for a few weeks,

• 23:08Speaker 02

  see how that performs, change it up for a few more weeks, compare the two. It really depends on your marketing style, but there are certain things that you can geek out about and other things you sort of just have to let it breathe.

• 23:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then how do you think about, when I worked at Facebook and we would really work on growth, or it's actually growing users, we used to break it down into there's new user acquisition, there's retention work, there's churns, and then there's resurrection. Is that a general framework that you guys look at? Or do you have some twist on it in terms of how you guys actually measure?

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So we have acquisition teams, retention teams, customer service teams. So they kind of hit different points in that customer journey all the way through.

• 23:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  But like you were alluding to, there's sort of the acquisition retargeting and like conversion channels, even just in your acquisition side of things. And yeah, you have different priorities and messaging and funnels for all those different steps.

• 24:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And the reason I ask is because one of the things that's different about crypto and Bitcoin than let's say like, you know, a social application or a mobile app or something is that like the whole idea of like holding is a use case, right? So I went on somewhere, I bought Bitcoin and I'm just holding on to it. I'm not necessarily transacting, I'm not necessarily, you know, doing anything without selling it or anything. But because I'm holding it, I still am a user.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And so are you an active user? Are you not an active user? Right? That changes the way that you think about retention and resurrection of churn users, etc. Just like, how do you think of that having come from like the not crypto world?

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Into the crypto world and kind of what's the comparison there?

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I consider myself one of those people that you just described. Like, I first bought in 2013 and I've never sold any of it. Like, I'm just a long-term holder. So my lifetime value on an exchange is the fact that I dollar-cost average. So I buy a small amount once a week and I've been doing that for a couple of years. And that's my value to them. However, for customers that sort of buy once a quarter, like once every few months, those are valuable people too, because a lot of these people keep their equity on the exchange. So that's valuable to the company as well. There's opportunities to upsell.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  From a, I guess in crypto, upselling is more like encouraging people to educate themselves more in order to, I don't know, improve their trading strategies if they're that kind of investor. Or just in general, engage with your brand in a way that they're enriching their knowledge in the category.

• 25:53Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. What are some of the campaigns that you've seen others run that you're impressed by?

• 26:00Speaker 02

  I think Cosette is really amazing things. And I think that the core, from a marketing perspective with them, is that they obviously pay a lot of attention to customer experience. And, you know, this is a brand that's not just online. Like, so much in crypto is magical internet money that you have no physical connection to. And they do a really fantastic job of making the complex process of, you know, becoming your own bank, something that's user-friendly, but also aesthetically nice. And I, you know, I'm constantly looking at what they're doing as sort of a

• 26:45Speaker 02

  a leading indicator for where we should all be trying to go.

• 26:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Who else? Anybody else?

• 26:51Speaker 02

  I really like BlockFi.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  It's, you know, I think that from a high level with crypto, um, let's say crypto adoption, to the point where we all sort of are striving and hoping that we're all going to end up where everyone in, you know, the USA is engaged in one way or another with either Bitcoin or cryptocurrency more largely. Um, there's three steps how I think about it. So there's sort of, uh, like the MVP, which was, you know, early days, people sort of, um, buying stuff, a little bit of something here, a little bit of something there. Uh, Bitcoin wasn't really worth that much at the time and there were fluctuations,

• 27:37Speaker 02

  but it wasn't something that we thought we would be, you know, I didn't know we'd be in a office in midtown Manhattan, recording a podcast five years ago, right? I got dress shoes on today, too. I was looking sharp. Go ahead. Uh, so there's sort of like that MVP stage. Next, we've sort of got our, our, you know, we're thinking about it like building a product, right? So you got your beta testers and we've got a little bit of a proof of concept. So people are onboarding into the ecosystem. We're seeing that the base layer is usable. You can trust it. You know, the Bitcoin protocol hasn't been, you know, taken over by some bad actor. Um, so we have a

• 28:19Speaker 02

  bit of a, an idea of where we can go and we're sort of listening to the needs of the consumer. And we're sort of in, in some middle stage before what the third one is, which is more of like a mass adoption, right? Like we have the whole stacking SATS phenomenon, which is kind of in my mind, a little bit of a placeholder for whatever that next step is. But where I see BlockFi's role is, you know, we before, we're building all this future tech and there has to be context for this future tech. And I really think that the first step to getting there is building financial tools, uh, within the crypto ecosystem that sort of mirror what goes on in the traditional finance world.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  In order to get people comfortable with the technology and then from there you can start building and innovating to whatever that future tech is because people are already on boarded into this decentralized free flow of money technology.

• 29:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And how do you think about like what I'll call more of the ancillary platforms, right? So like Reddit isn't huge in traditional marketing, even YouTube's not that big in I think a lot of traditional marketing plans, those are much bigger in crypto, like how do you think about the intersection of a company like Etoro that does, you know, literally sponsors, I'll call it soccer, they call it football teams, cabs, and then also like you have to deal with these platforms that are more kind of niche, like what do you guys think about there?

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's interesting, right? Like Reddit really was crypto Twitter before crypto Twitter, I think most people were talking about it on Reddit before they, you know, were shitposting on Twitter all day. That's where I discovered Bitcoin for the first time. But the flip side of it is that now Reddit for a large percentage of the content on there has actually been gamified by marketers, so most of the stuff that does hit the front page or hits your timeline is something that someone more than likely manipulated to get there in one way or another, and I'm not saying all of the content is, but a good chunk of it is.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Their ad platform is improving over time, but you know, is notoriously inefficient. So whether that's from a targeting standpoint or just performance overall, it's always at least been a struggle for me and I think a lot of people would agree with that.

• 30:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Skrt skrt, wanna know who has the best URL? Crypto.com, that's right, crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal, motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why we're all here, we're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending and card payment. Everything you could want at crypto.com. Go help your boy out. Tell him POMP sent you. Download the app or visit crypto.com. POMP's got you always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy POMP's got you. Everybody got some electricity and wifi. All you gotta do is go to coinmine.com, you buy a coin mine.

• 31:27Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like an Xbox or a Playstation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. That's right. You purchase it, it shows up at your doorstep, you pull it out of the box, you plug it in, connect to your wifi, five minutes or less, you're mining Bitcoin. All you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide, and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis. Kinda like how Tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software. Just your update in your coin mine. Consumer mining made easy. That's right. Go to coinmine.com, tell them POMP sent you, and thank me later. One more word from our sponsor BlockFi. Their new interest account allows you to securely deposit your Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi

• 32:10Anthony Pompliano?

  and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. This rate actually compounds, so you receive a 6.2% APY, which is very attractive given the alternatives. So you can actually take your Bitcoin, you can deposit it with BlockFi, and get paid an interest rate of 6% in return. Go check out blockfi.com/pomp, again, blockfi.com/pomp, to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. So now's a good time. Disclosure, I'm an investor in Reddit.

• 32:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Go ahead. Through an SVB we did, go ahead.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  But with YouTube, for example, you know, it's similar to Twitter in the way that there are some huge crypto... Influencer like doesn't, almost doesn't feel like the right word for the people on YouTube. Like people like Luke Martin, who are just churning out all this really high-end content all the time. And there are people like learning how to do their entire careers based on watching videos of him every day, right? It is one of the fastest-growing platforms in marketing in general. And I think people have started noticing how YouTube has really invested in their ad placements. They're blowing it up. You can do Google Shopping Ads through YouTube placements now.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  They have banner ads on top of their actual like video ad placements, the pre-rolls and the mid-rolls and everything. So whether you're a crypto company, or an e-commerce brand, or whatever, spending money through, either through retargeting, or even acquisition on YouTube has to be part of your mix.

• 33:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What is the, not eTaurus, I'm not going to get into any of the confidential information, but just in your mind, like what is the difference between traditional marketing and these social platforms from a cost of acquisition standpoint?

• 34:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it a material, you know, like a magnitude difference? Is it actually not as big of a difference as people think? Just like, how do you think about, I have X dollars to spend, I need to be as efficient as possible. Is it true that the online platforms are that much more efficient? Or is it really the case depending on what I'm trying to accomplish and what the channel I choose is?

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, customer acquisition costs are actually not that much different. When you're sort of setting your flagpole based on what, you know, traditional financial firms are looking at or reported to be looking at, it's not that far off, which is actually really encouraging, considering the size of the crypto ecosystem versus the addressable market of like SoFi, or Wealthfront, for example.

• 34:49Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. I want to play a game. I didn't tell you we were going to play this game.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Okay, let's do this.

• 34:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I want to go through and see, one for one, to name every person we could think of on Twitter. First one to not be able to name, somebody loses.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  To not be able to name somebody?

• 35:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so you throw out a name, I throw out a name, and we'll see who uh who has to give up first.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Alright.

• 35:12Anthony Pompliano?

  They have to be somebody who, there's three criteria.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:15Anthony Pompliano?

  They have to be somebody who's into Bitcoin, crypto, etc.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:19Anthony Pompliano?

  They have to be regularly engaged, right? And they have to have some element of being a smart ass, a troll, or a shit poster.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  Oh, man. That's a lot of pressure. Let's do it.

• 35:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, you go first.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Alright, I gotta shout out my my buddy Cody Is Fun.

• 35:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, uh, I'm gonna go with uh my guy Peter McCormick, the troll of all trolls.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  That was my next one. Uh, how about we go with uh Peter Schiff on this next one?

• 35:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, uh, I'm gonna go with um Rhythm Trader.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 35:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Who responds to every one of my tweets.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Great guy.

• 35:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, and uh and rides off into the virality, which I appreciate.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Uh, you gotta shout out Marty Bent.

• 36:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Marty Bent, alright, I'll go with his counterpart, uh, Matt Odell.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Um, who else we got here? Tom uh Shaughnessy?

• 36:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Tom Shaughnessy? Okay. Um, I will go with uh Bellagi.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Nice. Um, who should I get? Uh, let's go with Yoni.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  Etero CEO.

• 36:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, well, okay, then I'll go with Zach Prince.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Let's go uh Brian Armstrong on this one.

• 36:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, I will go with uh, I feel like we should call her the queen of Wall Street at this point, uh, Caitlin Long.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Nice. Uh, let's go Crypto Bobby.

• 36:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Crypto Bobby. I will go with uh Tom Osha- or uh Jim Oshaughnessy, almost got me. Shout out Jim Oshaughnessy, who was one of the first three guests ever on Off the Chain, and came on and said at least fifty times, "I don't know."

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Uh, let's do uh Crypto Randy.

• 37:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Crypto Randy. I will go with uh Jill Carlson, and and I'll throw in the next one, and Meltem. For uh, what, What Grinds My Gear?

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Great podcast.

• 37:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Podcast, go ahead.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Uh, let's do, oh, I just had it.

• 37:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh-oh!

• 37:17Speaker 02

  No, I had a good one. No, I had a good one. I lost it.

• 37:23Anthony Pompliano?

  It's over.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  On the spot.

• 37:24Anthony Pompliano?

  It's over.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Literally all day. Ah, oh, man.

• 37:29Anthony Pompliano?

  He really, he really lost it.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  Oh, Luke Martin is what I was gonna say.

• 37:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Ah, it's over. Alright, we could have gone for a long time.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  We really could have.

• 37:37Anthony Pompliano?

  The reason I wanted to do that is if you look at all of those people, they all have completely different roles in an ecosystem.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 37:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's like the WWF. And I talked about this on the podcast before, but like, there's the heroes, there's the villains, there's like the tag team partners, right? Like, you get all this stuff and it's entertainment. At the end of the day, like, when you get on Twitter, yes, there is like, information and your learning and education and all that, but it's entertainment. Like, there are people dunking on each other, there are people trolling each other, there are people who have like, the longstanding feuds, there are the people who are like, overly nice to each other. And like, how does that company play into that? See, you thought I was joking around?

• 38:21Speaker 02

  I was like, wow, that was a, a long way to get to, to that question with the game, but, um, that's, you know, Twitter feuds are a funny thing, right? Like, some of those are a little bit manufactured for the sake of, uh, impressions. And some of those become real-life beefs. And I think the ones that are real-life beefs are things that are coming largely from a good place, right? Like, people have philosophical differences on the role of certain parts of crypto and blockchain tech, um, that really hit home for these people. Like, some people are really into Lightning Network and some people really

• 39:03Speaker 02

  like to troll Lightning Network people. Same with XRP and vice versa, right? Um, so when you're a brand in an ecosystem where this is likely to happen, um, you typically try to stay out of it. But, um, you know, sometimes it's good when there are trolls spending a bunch of time talking about you because sometimes that's a really interesting way to farm new farmer, followers on your brand and eventually they convert into new customers.

• 39:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there one troll that picks fights with people that you would say uh has done it well? Like like I said in a positive thing? And you can and you can opt out. I'll I'll give you an escape route if you don't want to answer. But but I'm just wondering like from a and not like somebody who picks fights necessarily, but just like trolls really well and it and it's worked out.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Uh, so he is not a troll and he's a great human being. But Peter McCormack's beefs are actually noteworthy for a number of reasons. I mean, like the the whole lawsuit thing that's going on. This is like an interesting thing that we should probably be talking about. Like someone's trying to uh claim a role of being the inventor of Bitcoin. And, you know, one could argue that maybe that person should be able to prove it. And, you know, so that person is also suing other people for saying the contrary. So maybe this is something that we should be paying attention to. Um, I mean, there there's.

• 40:33Anthony Pompliano?

  I love that you that you answered with Peter McCormack.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  So I'm gonna go with that one.

• 40:38Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, that's fair. What uh what's the one thing that you believe in marketing and crypto that you think most people don't understand or agree with, but you would want them to learn about?

• 40:51Speaker 02

  So.

• 40:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Basically, what's the secrets?

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, though honestly, with marketing and crypto, it's you gotta think of it as a long game, right? Like, in a lot of ways, certain key, like boilerplate, direct response, marketing things are not as effective as one would think. So if someone's coming from a direct response digital agency and is like, let's put all this crazy amount of money into AdWords. Well, if you're a small company with uh lean budgets, that might not be the best way to do it. Um, especially if you're a new company with not a lot of brand recognition. You should probably invest in uh something that's just gonna get as many eyeballs from your market segment on your brand as possible

• 41:35Speaker 02

  and then rely on your company being noteworthy enough to, you know, acquire the press mentions, which is really, you know, a really big. Part of marketing in crypto is being able to be noteworthy.

• 41:48Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And then what um, what do you see are the biggest mistakes that people make in that vein? Right? So there's definitely the people who come from traditional marketing who maybe don't understand the nuances of crypto. But like, what are some of the mistakes that you see teams making?

• 42:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think um, the people that are trying to monetize uh memes, right? So I can't remember who it was, but someone tried to trademark like the stacking sats thing a while back. And I get it because the claim was that they were trying to like protect it for the community. And that's what they said when they did it too, and when they presented it. But there were a lot of people that took exception to that. So it, you know, the brands aren't doing that to like screw you over. They are going into it with um, good intentions in mind, but sometimes it's hard to anticipate what the wider community is gonna try to go for.

• 42:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And there was another, what, stack stacking sats was one uh, and there was another thing somebody tried, wait, it was Coinbase tried to.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Do like HODL or something like that? Was that what it was?

• 42:48Anthony Pompliano?

  There was some other term that people tried to to uh trademark. And again, they were saying, hey, look, we're not gonna use it in an offensive manner.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:55Anthony Pompliano?

  It's more defensive, but still people not not uh not thrilled about it.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  It's a tough spot.

• 43:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, will we see eToro in the future get into uh similar things like they're doing internationally? Stocks are coming at some point.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 43:09Anthony Pompliano?

  What what can you say about like other things you guys are either thinking about? Uh, or other things that uh you personally would like to see you guys get into, anything you can talk about there?

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I mean, I can't get into too many details because we want it to be a surprise.

• 43:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, there's a PR person staring at me when I ask this question. It's like, it's like being under the gun, but I asked it anyways.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  So what I can say is that we're just trying to offer products that people want to use. And the exchange game really is about being sticky. So that, like you were alluding to a little bit earlier, like retention is a big part of that. So when you're thinking about how to retain people, what do they want to see? What are they, what exchanges are they likely using mostly? And what are the limitations of those platforms? We think that we already have a lot of really great value propositions that uh compete compete or beat what other people are offering. But being able to not only. Uh, surpass what other competitors are doing, but also be comparable with like incumbents

• 44:13Speaker 02

  in the traditional financial tools world. That's really important. So you see, you know, Robin Hood and all these companies trying to become non-bank lenders in the same way that SoFi has been doing it because they're trying to acquire more customers before making that attempt to go public or whatever, right? So it's about being sticky and, you know, listening to your customer base.

• 44:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Uh, before I wrap up, I always ask rapid fire set of questions.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:41Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the most important company in crypto other than eToro or BlockFi?

• 44:45Speaker 02

  Other than eToro and BlockFi, um, I really love the block.

• 44:51Anthony Pompliano?

  The block?

• 44:52Speaker 02

  I, I.

• 44:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 44:53Speaker 02

  That's a controversial topic. I think that, uh, those guys do a really good job of contextualizing everything from big to small stories in the space that help, um, you know, people that are even new to crypto, uh, at least understand what's going on, right? Um, it's really easy to get lost in a lot of the other publications. Um, and I think that, you know, the people over there are great and they do a really good job at what they do.

• 45:24Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the one regulation you would change or improve if you could?

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  I'm not sure.

• 45:34Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, bullshit. You got to answer. Come on.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I got head shaking in, in my.

• 45:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Come on, let's go.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, I'm not too focused, uh, on pending legislation when it comes to crypto.

• 45:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Uh, I'm more focused on making crypto approachable for the average consumer, right? Um, we put a lot of thought into the balance of, are we talking only to crypto people? Are we trying to convert what we call pre-coiners into the, the ecosystem? And I think that there are a lot of existing, uh, options for people that are really deep into crypto. They live and breathe it, but getting my dad into it, that's a whole challenge that I don't think anyone in the ecosystem has really cracked, really. Um, so we're investing quite a bit and figuring out how to do that.

• 46:30Anthony Pompliano?

  For those that don't realize what he just did, he didn't answer the question, but that's fine. What's the most controversial thought you have in crypto?

• 46:41Speaker 02

  I think that that we should be open to the idea of governments digitizing fiat currencies. Because I think that although a lot of people hate the idea of it very legitimately, because there's serious privacy concerns that go along with that, it becomes significantly easier to lock people out of the economy, follow all the payments people are doing. But the way that I think about it is when you introduce on that scale, and this goes

• 47:24Speaker 02

  into Libra a little bit as well, when you're introducing people at the scale of like 360 million people all at once, or a couple billion people overseas into the crypto ecosystem, and the government is finding a way, whether you think that's efficient or not, finding a way to make that an easy enough process that people can just opt in really simply. That is only, from that perspective, a good thing for crypto largely.

• 47:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I always just look at it as, will more people have digital wallets?

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And if more people have digital wallets, they have a choice.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 48:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And they can use whatever they want.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's our job to educate them on why something like Bitcoin is better than digital fiat.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:13Anthony Pompliano?

  But digital fiat will accelerate digital wallet adoption.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I think one of the biggest gaps into onboarding into crypto is actually the terminology. My dad conceptually can understand what a wallet is, but trying to explain seed phrases and how important they are to save, and the fact that there's no one to call if he loses them, like his email password that he loses. What are you gonna do? It's a big deal, exactly. So that's why, even though it's a little bit controversial, centralized options are really important for what I consider the average person.

• 48:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and again, it's you need both, right? You need the decentralized, personal freedom-based, you know, kind of Bitcoin ethos-based options, and then you also need the centralized version because there's just some people aren't going to buy into or get comfortable with the other one.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 49:07Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the most important book you've ever read?

• 49:10Speaker 02

  I really love This is Marketing by Seth Godin. Probably read it two and a half times, and every time, I mean, that's not a lot, but

• 49:24Speaker 02

  I'm presenting it as if it's my like bible here, but every time I read it, there's like a new nugget, and the reason I say two and a half is because I'm constantly going back to like a page that I marked, because there's always something that I'm extracting from that.

• 49:39Anthony Pompliano?

  What uh, what's another book other than a marketing book?

• 49:46Anthony Pompliano?

  See, people come in here and they're all prepared to answer these questions, and then I just throw a little loop. Now, what's the second most important?

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Maybe this is uh, this doesn't reflect well on me, but I spend a lot of time reading newsletters and like money stuff, for example.

• 50:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Ah, Matt Levine!

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I didn't get Matt in here.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  Yo, you have to do that. Absolutely.

• 50:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, money stuff.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  You know, he is an amazingly talented writer in the way that he can turn a story that you are, you're assuming is gonna go one way into something else. He always ties an implication of one story into something else that's going on. And it really just broadens the way that I think about how, you know, one industry affects another, or how there's always something going on behind the scenes in a macro sense that's affecting all these sorts of businesses in ways that we wouldn't, you know, the layman wouldn't anticipate.

• 50:44Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Aliens, Real or Not?

• 50:47Speaker 02

  I think probably real.

• 50:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 50:49Speaker 02

  Just statistically.

• 50:51Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, no. Come on, why? Do you have to ever come to Earth?

• 50:55Speaker 02

  No, I don't think that's true.

• 50:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Why not?

• 50:57Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm open.

• 50:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Statistically.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  I'm open to the idea. I would, I would not be like a naysayer if there was like some sort of concrete proof. I'm like all about these New York Times articles that keep coming out twice a year.

• 51:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Look, it's Washington Post, New York Times. Like this isn't, you know, like Alien, uh, Conspiracy Theory dot com. This is like legit media is saying, hey, this might be real.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I'm like, you know, my life is not about that. So I just don't spend too much time on it. But I think for sure there's life somewhere.

• 51:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I, uh, I, I don't know when this is gonna get posted. So I think that it's gonna come out before, uh, the alien interview. But I'm interviewing a guy tomorrow who, uh, he claims that 780,000 years ago, there was a, um, if I get this correct, I might get this wrong, but basically an alien techno-signature, extraterrestrial, post-biological, artificial intelligence spacecraft that blew up. And that's where all of these materials that people are showing up that have different, uh, physical property, like physics of, and, uh, quantum, uh, properties. That's where that material came from is from the 780,000 years ago, a, uh, alien spacecraft with all those characteristics blew up and crashed into Earth.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  But couldn't it have just been like asteroids hitting the Earth that contain those properties?

• 52:18Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. May, but maybe the asteroid had the aliens on it. Who knows?

• 52:22Speaker 02

  I tend to think that the simpler explanation is probably what happens.

• 52:27Anthony Pompliano?

  I got intrigued just because I wanted to know what an extraterrestrial, post-biological, artificial intelligent, alien aircraft is like. Um, all right. What one question you have for me to finish up?

• 52:38Speaker 02

  Um, what do you think the next stage in crypto is? So when you think about, uh, the focus over the last year and a half on making products that are approachable by consumers and usable with a good UX, what is the next step? Now that we have good UXs, what's, what's the next step?

• 52:59Anthony Pompliano?

  There's three milestones that I'm waiting for. Uh, one is a sovereign nation acquiring Bitcoin and putting it in their, uh, national reserves. Uh, I think that you will see a bonanza. Like, you think you seen a chart go bend backwards? Like, that thing will explode. That's one. Uh, and we kinda saw that this week with China saying that they were going all in on blockchain. And it specifically said Bitcoin.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:27Anthony Pompliano?

  But they, they definitely directionally are now becoming more public about, hey, this is serious. This is important. We're gonna make it a national initiative. Uh, the second thing, I think, is, uh, today, we're probably at like 1% of the world's population, about 70 million people. Uh, I think that when we get to 10%, so like an order of magnitude from here, uh, I think that's-

• 53:48Speaker 02

  That's a lot of people.

• 53:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's a lot, well, yes, 700 million people. Uh, if you think about that, that's like, really breaking the threshold of like true global adoption, right? But it's still, you got 90% to go from there, right, to get everyone. So it's not like an impossible number, but it's also like, to go from 70 to 700, like, you gotta, you know, 10x, right?

• 54:09Speaker 02

  And what indicator would you use to know that? Like, some people like to look at the amount of wallets that are being opened, but you know, everyone has like 10, 50 wallets they've generated over time, right? So what are you looking for?

• 54:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think it's one metric, right? I think, I think it's like a whole host of different things. Um, and then I think what you probably can do if you really wanted one metric is you could take that wallet, you try to figure out like, what's the average number of wallets somebody has, right, and kinda back it into it. Uh, or you could look at the exchanges, and you could probably, uh, like, chaperal it out how quickly they're acquiring users, right? And then if a new user comes into the ecosystem, how many exchange accounts do they set up? It's probably one, and then for some period of time, it's two, three, whatever. Uh, and then what you can do is kind of like do some math and say, okay, this is what we kind of think it is. Uh, but part of the beauty is we'll never know.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 54:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, and then the third one is, I think, uh, a sovereign nation not only puts it in the reserves, they adopt Bitcoin as the goal, as the national currency.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  How far away are we from that?

• 55:08Anthony Pompliano?

  10 years or less.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Or less?

• 55:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 55:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that there's some countries that are in really, really big trouble.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And, uh, I think that somebody's gonna throw a hail mary.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, think about it, iPhone's 12 years old. Not really that long, right?

• 55:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Feels like forever.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  It really does.

• 55:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Like feels like I like grew up with this thing in my hand.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Check out first cell phone when I was in high school. Right? Like wasn't smartphone either, right?

• 55:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I actually think, uh, did you ever have one of the sidekicks?

• 55:40Speaker 02

  We didn't have them in Canada.

• 55:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Slid out and you had the keyboard?

• 55:43Speaker 02

  We didn't have them in Canada.

• 55:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Man, I didn't get one until I was in college, but I wanted one so bad.

• 55:49Anthony Pompliano?

  But like if you think about it, right? iPhone's 12 years old. Uh, if you look at, you know, today, yeah, Bitcoin is 11, right? It actually turns 11 on the October 31st. Um, from the white paper, but like, I'll buy into the idea that in the first 20 years, since the white paper gets released, one country decides. And it could be some, you know, nonsense, small, like hail Mary type situation. Or it might not be like it may be some real.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:19Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, established country, but like to me, that is the, the three milestones, right? Is you've got to get somebody putting in the national reserves. You gotta get it, uh, to 10% global population. And then you gotta get a country to accept it or, or to identify it with it as its national currency. And then like hyper Bitcoinization is a foregone conclusion at that point.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 56:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And, uh, you know, Trace Meyer and every other yahoos that, you know, from early days of Bitcoin are all vindicated.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, and so far, so good for that all of them, but I think that that's like when it's going to be pretty indisputable. Like this is real.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 56:58Anthony Pompliano?

  You agree?

• 56:59Speaker 02

  I do.

• 57:00Anthony Pompliano?

  But 10 years or less than a, a country.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  Oh no. So I don't know. I think that's a debatable topic. I mean, what in your mind, what is like the impetus that they switch from their, uh, fiat to, um, Bitcoin as their like national currency? It's like the failing of the state?

• 57:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, no failing of the currency.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Of the currency.

• 57:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Like their currency fails and they're like, fuck, what do we do? We can try to start another one.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Or like, oh, let's just use this one. Like we don't have control over it, but neither does anybody else.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  Do you think that we have to see a, a stabilization of the price before we get to that point?

• 57:33Anthony Pompliano?

  It is stable.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  How stable?

• 57:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, if you price goods in Bitcoin, it's stable.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  That's true. Bitcoin's always one Bitcoin.

• 57:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, it's like dollars, right? Like technically, the dollar continues to lose value every year, but $1 is $1, and it just costs more dollars to buy that asset. And like, I get some people don't like that analogy or whatever, but at the same time, like, that's the same way that fiat works, right? Is, the problem is that what you're trying to buy, you're using one currency to buy something priced in another currency. If you price everything in that currency, then you don't have the quote-unquote volatility because you're just simply buying things that are priced in the same currency that you hold. Now, it would be a big, you know, kind of mental switch for an entire country to do that, but I think that from a top-down in some countries, if the government said, "This

• 58:24Anthony Pompliano?

  is the new national currency," like, sure, I just want to get paid, man, right? Like, I just want to provide for my family, right? I just want to live a good life. Like, the people aren't really that complicated when you think of the incentive system.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  And then at what point do we switch to satoshis as our, like, main unit?

• 58:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think that's what would happen whenever, you know, whenever you'd switch to national currency.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 58:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Is basically, think, most things would get priced in satoshis, just given that, at that point, you know, in the next 10 years, it's like, you know, I don't think Bitcoin's $8,500, right?

• 58:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:55Anthony Pompliano?

  What it is, who knows, but, you know, even today, $8,500, you want to buy a pack of gum, like, it's not going to be, you know, "Hey, you owe me, you know, 1/10,000 of a Bitcoin."

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:08Anthony Pompliano?

  It's definitely going to be priced in satoshis.

• 59:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So, I don't know. All right, thanks for coming to do this. Sorry that I had to embarrass the PR component, but that's my new rule, is if people bring PR folks, they're getting embarrassed.

• 59:22Anthony Pompliano?

  But I'm getting a thumbs up from them, so that means that we didn't violate any rules. And where can people go find out more about eToro?

• 59:30Speaker 02

  You can head to etoro.com

• 59:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Slash pomp.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  Slash pomp. Find out more. Go in, fund your account, complete a trade, and pretty soon you'll be able to copy other people.

• 59:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. And where can they find you?

• 59:44Speaker 02

  You can find me on Twitter at @bradmichelson.

• 59:48Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a very original name.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  I know. I thought really hard about it.

• 59:51Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, man, thanks so much. We'll do it again.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 59:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey everyone, Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.