#1508 Jan Van Eck | How Bitcoin Is Taking Over Wall Street

Jan Van Eck is the CEO at VanEck. This conversation was recorded at Bitcoin Investor Week in New York. In this conversation we talk about the relationship between bitcoin and gold, how bitcoin will disrupt Wall Street, the impact Trump will have on financial markets, and what crypto milestones Jan is looking forward to in 2025.=======================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/=======================This episode is brought to you by Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR), a global leader in Bitcoin mining and high-performance computing for AI. Led by a seasoned management team, Bitdeer is driving innovation with its proprietary SEALMINER ASICs for Bitcoin mining and has a massive 2.5 GW power portfolio across three continents. Learn more about Bitdeer at www.bitdeer.com=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

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• 1:56Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:40Anthony Pompliano?

  That's B-I-T-D-E-E-R dot com. Go check out Bitdear today. All right, you guys have approximately $120 billion under management?

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 2:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And you, I think, publicly have said that you have approximately 30% of your net worth in Bitcoin?

• 2:59Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 3:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. You also, I think, are one of the largest asset managers when it comes to gold?

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  A little bit on VanEck, you want?

• 3:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Sure.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  So, yeah, just a couple of sentences. So VanEck, big ETF issuer right now. We launched the first gold fund in the United States in 1968. So I like to say that, you know, kind of hard asset investing is in our blood, and we were the first ETF issuer to file for a Bitcoin ETF in 2017. So that's brief fact.

• 3:35Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you look at the relationship between gold and Bitcoin now? And one of the things that's interesting to me is last year, we saw gold was up 50% or so, Bitcoin was up about 100%. Central banks are buying hand over fist gold, were knocking on the door of $3,000, you know, depending on the day. And I think there's a lot of Bitcoiners that used to say Bitcoin is better than gold, gold is going to go down in value, it's going to be demonetized by Bitcoin, Bitcoin's going to be this great thing, and it's going to surpass gold. Bitcoin has grown very quickly, but gold has continued to do very, very well in this economic environment since 2020. Do they just win together forever? Or how do you look at that relationship?

• 4:16Speaker 03

  I think the assets kind of rhyme. They do tend to hit all-time highs in the same calendar year. But I think that gold is really, I think they're different assets. They're definitely different assets, Anthony. So if you look about what's happened over the last year for both asset classes, I think it's been super, super interesting. So gold, even though M2, money supply, was shrinking, or at least the growth rate, which came down dramatically last year, gold rallied. That's unusual.

• 4:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do you think it happened?

• 4:51Speaker 03

  The dollar was strong. Gold rallied. That was unusual. So the typical narratives that you really have around gold, and we can get to Bitcoin in a second, have not really been holding. And this year, it's extended. And so the point I make is that we live in a different world. We live in a world of de-dollarization. I'm not the first person to make this point, but I really think it's profound. And the factoid I like to use is that India, I would say the best macro story in the world, in 10 years is going to be the size of continental European economy. So just think about that for a second. And what I also like to say is, that's not just a slide from an economist. I think that the

• 5:35Speaker 03

  further you look out, the higher your conviction can be about some investment trends. I don't know what gold's going to do today, this hour, this week, this year. But if you take these long-term trends on Bitcoin or gold, I think you see this de-dollarization playing out. Because the Indian policymakers, there's no correlation, they don't want to be a dollarized economy in any way, shape, or fashion. And so after you had the seizure of Russian reserves, after the invasion of Ukraine, that was the desire to de-dollarize, step one. And I do think the Trump tariffs, I admire our president, but all this crazy tariff talk, has just increased the native demand for non-American investors to buy gold. And so I think, look,

• 6:20Speaker 03

  we live, I always like to say, people talk about the Fed and the US and this, we live in a global investment world. And so I think that is the trend. It's a multi-decade trend of de-dollarization. It's a great bid under gold.

• 6:33Anthony Pompliano?

  When I think of you guys, obviously you're a very big asset manager in the United States, but you have done a fantastic job, I think, of going around the world and building out a business. And you have a lot of understanding, not only of what assets are popular globally, but also how these investors think. Bitcoin is a global asset that anyone can buy with an internet connection. It doesn't care about wealth status, or language, or religion, or any of these things. And it feels like it is maybe best understood in emerging markets. It feels like, to your point about gold, being desired in these markets. How do you see the demand shifting as the US political landscape is shifting? Right? Like, one of the things that's always surprised me is Bitcoin allows for people to get access to

• 7:18Anthony Pompliano?

  a financial asset that they don't need an American bank account for. And now, all of a sudden, we have this surge of excitement in the United States. Do you see that ripple effect globally as well? We've heard Mike Novogratz talk about sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East, saying, "If Trump cares about Bitcoin, I care about Bitcoin," right? Like, what are you seeing in these other markets?

• 7:37Speaker 03

  I'd say it's a similar theme to what I was saying about gold, which is, we live in a global world. And we're, you know, I think, I don't mean to diminish the president's election, but it's sort of like a blip in the context of Bitcoin. It's a global asset, as you said, global demand. What I like to point out as well is, there's a lot of on-chain demand for Bitcoin, right? It's an on-chain asset. And we haven't even started to move finance, really, on-chain at all. I mean, we're just even starting to, if we talk about it, demand for Bitcoin wrapped in TradFi, you know, kind of wrappers. But I think there's, you know, we're still early innings for this whole game.

• 8:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So the Bitcoin ETFs, obviously, had this huge impact. You guys were right there in the pack and had done a great job, I think, of going out and telling the story of Bitcoin and the ETF story. But it feels like Wall Street's not going to stop with just get spot exposure via the ETFs. We see all kinds of stuff in these 2X levered on top of Bitcoin treasury companies. We see principal protected nodes and all these other parts of the industry. How do you see product development on Wall Street for Bitcoin? Like where are we going to stuff this asset so that investors can get exposure?

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Well, I think leverage is incredibly important to the ecosystem and Bitcoin investors have had that through the Asian exchanges for many years. And one of the biggest buyer of the Bitcoin ETF so far are the hedge funds and they're probably doing the futures trade, right? So the more for ETFs, ETFs are really wonderful instruments because of their liquidity. Our biggest or our oldest ETF is gold miners ETF. And if you want to deploy 100 or 200 million dollars into gold mining shares, you will get way more liquidity trading GDX than you will even Newmont or Barrick. And so that is the beauty of sort of exchange traded vehicles. They bring that liquidity.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Derivatives add to that because every time people are trading these things or providing liquidity to ETFs, they need to hedge their balance sheets and they want to do that in an efficient way. And that's why the derivatives market is super important. We have options now on the ETFs and futures. So as we look for maybe other digital assets, I don't know if we're allowed to talk about them, right? Having those by regulated US exchanges, futures exchanges is really important as well.

• 10:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's dig into a little bit of nerd ETF talk for a second. There is cash and in-kind. I think that the ETF issuers, from what I understand, really wanted the in-kind component that was not approved initially. Are we going to get it? How does that work? Why is that advantageous in your opinion?

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, it's a huge... So there are actually some pretty big Bitcoin holders that would like to move their Bitcoin from a wallet into an ETF for a variety of reasons, and they can't do that. That becomes a taxable transaction now. So that is really... That's why issuers want to enable the in-kind transactions. But I would just, you know, take the opportunity to issue this warning note, right? Bitcoin is a bearer asset. Digital assets generally are bearer assets. Even in the ETF, their custody is not guaranteed by anyone. Coinbase, Gemini, we use both, they're not guaranteeing the safekeeping,

• 11:01Speaker 03

  right? So there was this big hack last week, and I think there was a huge misunderstanding by a lot of people in the markets about that particular risk. And so, just by the way of operations, actually, cash creates are safer, not to say anything nice about the former SEC, but they are a lot safer than in-kind. Because once you allow in-kind, you have to white-label, whitelist a lot of other wallets. And so, you know, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole either, but it's just something I wanted to take a note of, because it's a big event over the last week.

• 11:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. With Bitcoin, price is always something that people pay attention to. The beauty of your business is, you would like asset prices to go up, but naturally, you are providing solutions, and then individual investors can go ahead and choose what exposures they want. The Trump administration in the first term was obsessed with the stock market, as I think he's been most of his career. He wanted to see the US economy succeed, and therefore, he used the stock market as that proxy measurement. There is a flurry of articles over the last maybe two or three weeks that are now saying, "The stock market may not be as important. He's much more interested in this 10-year bond yield and trying to get that down." Talk a little bit about, you know, how you evaluate that as kind of

• 12:19Anthony Pompliano?

  his north star, and maybe any implications that would have for Bitcoin's price.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I am no macro genius, right, or political analyst, but I do have an opinion, and you did ask. So, number one, I think this president is a man on a mission. I think he looks at the next two years, because you never know what happens in midterms, and he's got two-year clock, and the clock is running. So I think he's looking at the clock almost every day. So that's number one. Number two, I think, you know, the tech community, and I listen to all those podcasts, I think what's underappreciated by people that don't listen is how absolutely deadly serious they are about the federal budget deficit. I mean, I listen to the All In Pod, David Friedberg, Saks, they've been talking

• 13:05Speaker 03

  about this week after week after week, and it wasn't mentioned during the election, right? But it is on their minds, and so they are trying to deal with this debt issue. And I think, so I take Doge very seriously. I maybe like to go into that a little bit. And I do think that they want to deal with the big federal debt. They want to restructure it. It's way too short-term in their minds. So, let me, if I could just take this a little bit further. My bet is that they are able to cut half a trillion dollars out of the federal budget on an annualized basis, starting in the next fiscal year, which starts in October 1. And they've laid the groundwork for this. I'll just give you one stat. There

• 13:49Speaker 03

  are 4 million federal government employees, but what people don't realize, how many million contractors are there, do you think, full-time contractors?

• 14:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Four to six times as many.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're too good. 20 million. 20 million. So, they're going to cut the spending, and I just, I hear stories every day about people who have lost their jobs, you know, with academic research or what have you. And so that's millions of people. So what I'd like to say is, our fiscal policy is like, has been like having two feet on the gas pedal. I mean, the Biden administration, like, they literally couldn't spend enough money as they were leaving office, right? And so that is going to be, I'll call it, recessionary step. In 2025, I think that leaves the Fed room to cut rates. And so I think that's the bargain. It's going to be this recessionary move.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  I'm pulling back on government spending, which is good for the 10 year. And we fold down the the front end of the curve if that becomes visible. We don't know it yet. And I like to highlight that. Like, it's really amazing as a macro investor and VanEck is kind of a macro shop. What do we care about monetary policy, fiscal policy? What are the levers of government, because they're such a big actor in the economy, going to do to the financial markets? And, you know, we don't know on fiscal policy. I mean, we can look at the 10 year and guess. But the Senate passed a bill last last week. There's been, there was like no coverage of its fiscal impact, right? The House just passed a reconciliation bill. Again, like a couple of tweets and things like that. But these are, this is fiscal policy.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  This should be front and central, right? Instead, we're focusing on tariff talk and everything else. So I think that's why the markets are a little bit nervous over the last couple of weeks. Because here it is, the biggest, one of the biggest levers of, biggest lever of two onto the financial markets. And we don't really, we're guessing, but we really have very little visibility into what's happening.

• 15:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I've been polling the audience all week long. Do you think that we're going to balance the budget?

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Balance the budget?

• 16:00Speaker 03

  Okay, so my my poll is, I'm going to give you my question, chief first creepers. So my question is, if we're at, let's say, 6% of of our federal budget deficit is 6% of GDP. Should we do a poll here? Are we allowed to do the live poll? So here's the question. Can we reduce that by 1%, 2% or 3%?

• 16:24Anthony Pompliano?

  How many people think 1%?

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Lowering the federal budget deficit as a percent of GDP. It's, let's call it 6% now, right? And and debt's out of control, right? Interest on the debts, the most expensive part of government spending now. Raise your hands, who thinks we can lower that by 1% in fiscal 2026?

• 16:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, we got some hands?

• 16:45Speaker 03

  Like 10, okay.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Are they more optimistic? Okay, it has to be 1, 2, or 3. So let's say 1% or less. Let's try this again. Can we cut the fiscal federal budget deficit by 1% or hardly at all? Oh, whoa, I didn't ask the question the right... See, I'm not you. Okay, so that was about a third of the audience?

• 17:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Who thinks we can cut it by 2% of GDP?

• 17:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Not as many hands.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  Oh, boy, 10, 12? And then 3%? No!

• 17:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I think we're gonna... Listen, no, here's my whole logic. I think that we're gonna balance the budget. I really do think so. And the reason is, I agree with you that...

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Wait, wait, wait. Time frame? Not next year?

• 17:29Anthony Pompliano?

  No. During the Trump presidency, I think he will get at least one balanced budget. I don't think that it is sustainable long-term, all this stuff. But I think that there's really three components to this. The first is, I agree with you that Doge, we need to take incredibly seriously. I think that they will be very, very good at cutting. And I think it's not just the waste, abuse, fraud stuff. I think that they will be able to cut things that previously were out of bounds. So entitlement spending is one example. There's not a politician in the world that could show up and say, "I'm gonna change it." So you have to be able to cut back the spending without touching the promise. And what it appears like is they believe they have identified fraud. And so if you're able to 10, 15, 30%, whatever that number is, if you're able to get rid

• 18:11Anthony Pompliano?

  of that, but also not change the promise, then you've kind of found this like almost judo move. And there's a lot of examples of where they think they can do that. The second thing is the tariffs. I know you don't like them, but I do think that we are gonna go from a world where we're default no tariffs, and it's used as a punitive tool. I think we're gonna switch to a default 5% or 10% tariff on every import to the United States. And then we will go to an incentive-based system where we will remove a lot of them to actually incentivize the product, services, countries, and companies that we want to come to the US. And then the third thing...

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Hold on. What's the revenue associated with tariffs? 5%, 10% tariffs across the board?

• 18:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I would have to do, it really depends on what the incentive is, right? Because there's a lot of things that we're not going to be able to put that 10% on, right? But let's just say that Doge, I'm probably a little bit more optimistic than you. I think they can get to a trillion in savings, but you say 500 billion, so let's use 500. Let's say that the tariffs are good for approximately another 500 billion. Ready? I think that the number one thing people are underestimating is-

• 19:13Speaker 03

  What's in this water?

• 19:14Anthony Pompliano?

  If you put Howard Lutnick and Scott Besant in a room with Trump and you say, "We gotta make money," and they look at the balance sheet of the United States, I think these guys are going to start doing all kinds of stuff. And the Ukraine mineral rights deal is one example, but I think that there's going to be a fire sale of US government buildings that are just unused. I think that they are going to start doing all kinds of these deals, which previously people thought was not the role of the government. And now, what you've essentially done is you put business people there. So if they can get another trillion, you know, we're throwing out hundreds of billions and trillions here, you would essentially be able to close the gap and get pretty close. And then, you know, there's like wishful thinking for an extra 10%, so we'll be in a surplus.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  Okay, and are there any risks to this scenario?

• 19:58Anthony Pompliano?

  There's an incredible amount.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  If we hit a recession, recessions typically cost 1, 2, or 3%-

• 20:06Anthony Pompliano?

  100%.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  -of GDP.

• 20:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So here's a good question for you. Is, one of the things that also is true is what's good for the country may not be good for Bitcoin. So if we balance the budget, is that actually a headwind for Bitcoin and could hurt the price?

• 20:19Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 20:20Anthony Pompliano?

  No?

• 20:21Speaker 03

  I think we're talking about just an adoption of digital gold, and we're in the middle of a trend. And I think it's kind of unstoppable, it's sort of a secular trend. And, you know, people did celebrate a lot with the election of Donald Trump, but, you know, there's a lot of further adoption to go. A lot of governments haven't gotten involved. Corporations are actually excitingly involved, but there's a lot to go there. There are a lot of investors who are just barely starting to talk about it. I was at a conference in Dallas earlier this week, a big RIA. They just are now allowing their advisors to solicit Bitcoin investments. So it's a long ways to go.

• 21:03Anthony Pompliano?

  BlackRock just made the announcement they're going to put, you know, this in every portfolio. We know that there's many RIAs in large institutions, wirehouses, you know, you just go through the kind of all of the different types of organizations. 12 months ago, zero of them were even allowed to talk about it, let alone they were doing anything. What is the timeline that you think it takes for them to pretty much say, okay, this is like a default part of a portfolio across all of Wall Street?

• 21:29Speaker 03

  This is a really, really important part of the equation in terms of the adoption by the wealth industry, right? So if hedge funds own like 27 billion of Bitcoin ETFs, I think RIA has owned something like 7 billion, you know, ballpark. But that 7 billion, a lot of that comes through, maybe not that 7 billion, but RIA assets come through model portfolios. And the one thing I don't think we've talked about yet today is the correlation, it sounds stupid, right? But, and I hate correlation, this is statistic, but the correlation of Bitcoin against the NASDAQ. Because that was something, I've really felt it hurt the Bitcoin ETFs last year, because people are like, it's just a risk on asset. It had a 60% correlation to the NASDAQ. What do you need it for?

• 22:12Speaker 03

  And the people that sit in the dark rooms and make the model portfolios up there, like it's not additive, right? I already own a lot of Q's, I already own a lot of semis, I don't need Bitcoin. So that's actually fallen, the 30-day daily volatility has fallen to about 0.25. And I don't know if that's what got BlackRock to put them in their model, but I think that's something that I'm really keeping an eye on, and I hope that continues to go lower, because over the last 10 years, it's like zero. But an allocator that's looking at 0.6 in the short term is, I think, has, was not embracing Bitcoin. So this is, this is an exciting thing.

• 22:48Anthony Pompliano?

  You, you mentioned earlier this idea of like Bitcoin in a wrapper, right? And the ETF is kind of the wrapper around Bitcoin.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I would argue that many of the Bitcoin treasury companies are another form of Bitcoin with a new wrapper, where now the equity investors or the debt investors can go and buy these financial instruments and get exposure to Bitcoin. We have seen some asset managers start to talk about, oh, I have a fixed income fund, maybe we'll put 5% Bitcoin in there as a way to almost juice the return. And if you have these kind of peer comparisons, if you're outperforming, then does that like reflexively force your peers to start to do this? How do you just look at Bitcoin not necessarily as a single asset that people want? exposure to, but actually Bitcoin being added to some of these other strategies that are very popular. Like, you know, I'm assuming someone somewhere is going to launch a Mag7 plus Bitcoin ETF at some point.

• 23:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, like those types of things, if for no other reason than it sounds good in headlines. If headlines could drive capital flows, somebody will try it.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, it depends on the narrative, I think, like maybe Mag7 with Bitcoin makes sense. Maybe, you know, but I think for a fixed income, I think most gatekeepers would say, no, I want, you know, my peanut butter here, my jelly there, and I'll mix them. So, don't, don't, don't. Asset managers love to do that. They love to sneak in different asset classes. So, we launched a CLO ETF almost three years ago. And that's, it's, it's basically this institutional fixed income instrument that has great risk return characteristics, but like kind of no wealth manager or average person knew what they were and they sounded weird. So, but like probably over 10 years and they trade it, you get a premium yield to the, right now.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  But, you know, so they were mixed in to like every fixed income, you know, multi-strat. But, you know, my feeling is that'll go away as, as retail gets involved, the, you know, the premium will get involved. So, they do love to play that game, but I think that's a limited game.

• 24:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Vanek, you guys are big Bitcoin proponents. You've done a fantastic job there. You support the Bitcoin ecosystem. There's a bunch of stuff that you guys are doing. But you also, I think, have an understanding that there is a broader industry of assets. And sometimes it makes sense to have exposure to Bitcoin. Sometimes it makes sense to have exposure elsewhere. You've got a liquid fund where you guys are trading in and out of these assets. Just talk about like Bitcoin's role with these other things, right? So, it doesn't mean that these other funds necessarily have no Bitcoin. It's just in January, maybe it's a good time to have Bitcoin. In February, maybe it's not, right? And trying to kind of think through these market cycles and the macro backdrop.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  I look at Bitcoins very different from other digital assets. I just look at it totally different. I say, look, add Bitcoin. It's sort of a store of value, gold type of asset. Whatever you feel comfortable with there. The others are really, I would say, aggressive growth equity types of allocation, right? An allocation to Solana or what have you. I mean, that's to me like semiconductors or nuclear, you know, nuclear energy, SMRs and that kind of stuff.

• 25:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I think the BlackRock number was 1.5% into the portfolios.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I have seen estimates as low as like half a percent in these model portfolios. I've seen people estimate as high as 5%. You're at 30% personally in Bitcoin, right? There are plenty of portfolios out there where gold is a much larger percentage than 1%, right? Where do you feel like Bitcoin probably ends up? Do you have a gut feel for, you know, the wealth industry in general, that model portfolio that kind of averages them all together? Is it like a half a percent, 1% thing? Or do you think it's higher?

• 26:21Speaker 03

  I mean, we're at 2% in our, we have sort of 60, 40 models and we're at 2%. And now we will trade that, right? You know, if it goes to 3% or 4%, we'll sell. If it goes down, we'll buy. So that's our, I think what happens personally, if you're lucky enough to be early and the way to, as everyone here knows, the way that, you know, the first question you ask a Bitcoin or is what year did you start buying, right? Then you know how big their wallet is. But basically, you know, what, once they start making so much money, they don't ever want to sell. So then they say, well, that's really, my Bitcoin's not my normal portfolio, right? That's not normal portfolio allocation. And I think that's what advisors are doing is like, here's my regular portfolio and wow, you were lucky to get into Bitcoin. Let it run.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  I was on the panel on Wednesday with a gold bug who bought gold in 74. You know, he's talking to my dad back then. And like, he's never sold his gold. He's never going to, right? So he owns like 20 or 30% in gold, but that's not, that's not what he would advise anyone else to do.

• 27:19Anthony Pompliano?

  That makes sense. What is the number one milestone or development in 2025 that you guys are paying attention to? Is it the strategic reserve or something else?

• 27:28Speaker 03

  I, for me, it's actually not Bitcoin. It does have to be Bitcoin related.

• 27:33Anthony Pompliano?

  It's your show.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  Stablecoins is the most interesting to me. I'm, I really applaud what Senator Lummis and Chris Land and on their staff are doing. They're, I guess, going to, you know, propose that bill in March and then hopefully it gets done before Labor Day. I think it was Labor Day. I'm just telling you that he's going to have to pull all-nighters because I am really worried. I don't know if there's anyone from JP Morgan here, but I'm really worried that the bank regulators are going to try to kill the stablecoin bill or say that you have to be a bank to issue a stablecoin or something like that. And that will just kill it in the US and the development will happen overseas. So I would say that is the biggest... I mean, I think we're just burned, right? People in crypto with choke points and all this kind of stuff.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  It's just, do we really think that good stuff will come out of DC? I'd rather have no regulation than any regulation. But, well, maybe I'm just too bearish. I don't know. I'm a New Yorker.

• 28:31Anthony Pompliano?

  I have to make sure that you're a good dad. Your son has a stablecoin that is becoming quite popular. Can you tell a little bit as to, you know, you already have two stablecoins out there that I think people say, hey, these are the two big winners. But obviously, there's a belief that there can be room for more than just two. What is kind of the angle for the stablecoin?

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're in an industry of stablecoins where you have two giants, right? Tether and Circle. And I think he just saw a market entry opportunity for having sort of a little bit of a go-to-market strategy that's different from Circle. Because Tether is non-U.S., basically. They don't want to come onshore. So, you know, I think there is a lot of opportunity with stable. I think there's a big opportunity with tokenization, actually. If Hester Purse and the SDC does what they say they're going to do, actually, our industry, I don't think we can imagine how much change there's going to be in terms of tokenization of assets. Because if... Anyway, I won't go down the rabbit hole too much.

• 29:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, tell us.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  Well, a lot of what's been allowed in Europe regarding tokenization, they still say, well, you have to be tethered to the traditional financial system because of the clearance mechanisms and things like that. But if you actually trust the blockchain to take care of the ownership of an asset, of a tokenized fund or whatever, that's revolutionary. That will allow a lot of, you know, a lot of innovation to happen.

• 30:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Ladies and gentlemen, Jan Van Eck.