Pod Insights Bankless The ETH Treasury Race Has Officially Begun | Sam Tabar, CEO of Bit Digital (2nd Largest) About this episode The race for ETH supremacy among public companies is heating up—and BitDigital is charging hard. CEO Sam Tabar joins us to share why they’re going all-in on Ether, how they're copying Michael Saylor’s playbook (but for ETH), and what sets BitDigital apart from the rest of the pack
We talk staking strategies, ETH yields, competitive dynamics, and the explosive rise of ETH treasury companies. This is the next phase of institutional Ethereum adoption—don’t miss it.
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
0:57 Why ETH?
10:49 Ethereum TAM
12:11 Bit Digital
14:18 ETH Treasury Competition
19:07 Is This a Bubble?
21:30 Risks Involved
24:15 Financial Engineering
28:31 ETH Staking Yields
32:15 Ditching Bitcoin Mining
38:02 How Big is This?
40:09 Why Bit Digital?
41:37 Closing & Disclaimers
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RESOURCES
Sam Tabar
https://x.com/samirtabar
Bit Digital
https://bit-digital.com/
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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 I remember having a private meeting with Michael Seeler last year, a year and a half ago. He probably won't be too happy about me admitting this and what was the content of the conversation. We were in the boardroom together and he was telling me how Bitcoin mining was a shit business. And that I should really, I should really think about just being a Bitcoin treasury business. And I said, well, that's interesting. I kind of agree with you halfway, but I'm thinking about doing that. But for Ethereum, he gave me the dirtiest look. The conversation kind of died. It was a pretty bad vibe in that room.
0:41 David Hoffman? Bankless Nation, we are here with Sam Tabar. He is the CEO of Bit Digital. Bit Digital is one of the ETH treasury companies that has recently come online and is already one of the largest ETH treasury companies among publicly traded companies. Sam, welcome to Bankless.
0:56 Speaker 00 Thanks for having me.
0:57 David Hoffman? Sam, why ETH?
1:00 Speaker 00 Look, I don't think there is any second best when it comes to rewriting the financial system. Bitcoin doesn't have the ability of smart contracts to change value, to exchange value without a middleman. And, and there's a lot of reasons why Ethereum didn't really have its, you know, time. And it's sort of like sun in the day because there was a lot of the era of Gary Gensler. It was a really dark time for Ethereum. There are many developers, friends of mine who didn't, you know, they were wondering if they were going to go to jail the next day, if they were working on a project that Gary Gensler would pursue them on.
1:37 Speaker 00 That era is, is now done and you're seeing a lot of congressional acts such as the Genius Act. That did a lot of, clarified a lot of rules about stablecoins being used as payment instruments. And as we all know, more than half of stablecoins are built on Ethereum. And we're seeing also upcoming acts like the Clarity Act that's being passed hopefully by Congress. And you're just seeing a lot of this regulatory clarity right now in Ethereum. And, you know, it's ETH that powers the most widely used blockchain in the world. Its utility is irrefutable.
2:16 Speaker 00 And, and frankly, I really do believe, I think it was Ryan that mentioned, that posted a tweet that really resonated with me. I think it was your tweet, Ryan, where you said that if Ethereum and Bitcoin were launched on the same day, we probably would never have heard of Bitcoin right now. And I completely believe that. That was a real excellent post if that was yours. So Ethereum, there was a lot of fut around it and Gary Gensler couldn't even admit whether it was a commodity or a security. And now we're seeing that Ethereum is now being classified
2:57 Speaker 00 as a commodity, just as Bitcoin. And Michael Saylor did a really good job marketing Bitcoin, and he brought it really far. And it was a very easy story to tell. And some people would be ashamed to admit it, but I'm not. I am shamelessly, and some of us in the industry are shamelessly copying Michael Saylor's playbook. It does work. There is a reason why that works. I remember having a private meeting with Michael Saylor last year, a year and a half ago. He probably won't be too happy about me admitting this. And what was the content of the conversation? We were in the boardroom together and he was telling
3:35 Speaker 00 me how Bitcoin mining was a shit business, and that I should really go into, I should really think about just being a Bitcoin treasury business. And I said, well, that's interesting. I kind of agree with you halfway, but I'm thinking about doing that, but for Ethereum. He gave me the dirtiest look. The conversation kind of died. It was a pretty bad vibe in that room. As I was walking away, because the vibes just died. He said, you know, don't do that because that thing is going to zero. So I was like, if you say so.
4:14 Ryan Sean Adams? It's sort of funny, Sam, actually, just on that really quickly. Why do you think Michael Saylor has never purchased Ether, the asset? Is that just part of the persona? Do you have to do that if you're Michael Saylor and you're pursuing this strategy? You have to be the biggest, baddest Bitcoin maxi in town?
4:30 Speaker 00 Listen, to be successful in anything, in anything, whether it's working out, or a business, or a podcast, you have to be extreme. That's the formula. The formula to success is you have to just be kind of extreme. You have to like... You have to be as biggest and baddest and outspoken as possible. Brain deos, yeah. And so I get that. That's what he's doing. He's just being a maxi maxi. You know, that's, that's, that's his, that's the marketing campaign that he's doing. He can't be measured. If he's measured and if he's, you know, talking about, you know, the grays, the light grays and the dark grays, he's gonna just, the marketing message will get lost. He's not talking to an academic audience.
5:15 Speaker 00 He's talking to a retail audience and the retail audiences, you have to remember this retail audience, they've been holding fiat as a way to basically build up their savings, let alone, I'm not talking about stocks, I'm just talking about fiat for now. And if you look at fiat, that's the, basically the ultimate shitcoin. It's lost basically 97% of its purchasing power since the seventies. And, and that, that is, that is, that's a real problem. And so Bitcoin did solve that issue to a large extent. It has a limited supply and so on, but it doesn't have utility. And Bitcoin's real competitor is the gold markets. The gold markets is 13 trillion dollar market cap right now.
5:59 Speaker 00 And what is Bitcoin right now? I think two or three trillion in market cap. And so I do agree with Michael Stell's thesis that, that Bitcoin is an incredible store of value. That if you hold your savings in fiat, it's not going to end well for you. There is a 100% track record of fiat going down, not up over time. And so Bitcoin does, does truly solve for that, but its main competitor is truly the gold markets. And I tell you what, the gold markets are going to be replaced by Bitcoin, especially when guys like you and me
6:38 Speaker 00 and, you know, millennials and Gen Z, when they become in positions of power to create portfolio construction for family offices and institutions. They would have normalized crypto and they would have normalized Bitcoin and they would very likely use babies, basically around. 5% of the overall portfolio for that particular family office for Bitcoin to hedge inflation bets and not gold, which is what boomers do. So generationally Bitcoin will go up and it will replace the gold markets. And so that is, that's a sure bet. But when it comes to rewriting the financial system,
7:17 Speaker 00 that's Ethereum, that's not Bitcoin. And it has the, it has the ability to, to, as mentioned earlier, to exchange value without an intermediary. And the financial system makes a lot of money creating friction. That is how they make money. The friction being you have, you need a contracts lawyer, you need a banker, you need an escrow agent. Ethereum gets rid of all of that when you're transferring value. So that's what I mean by rewriting the financial system.
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10:38 Ryan Sean Adams? So Sam, if Bitcoin is going to replace something like gold, which is what, you know, like 15 to 20 trillion? What's the big number that Ether, ETH the asset, is going to replace? Like, I mean, we like big numbers, we like benchmarks here. I mean, how, what's the total addressable market for this thing? And how do you view ETH the asset itself?
10:58 Speaker 00 Look, I think it's 10 times bigger than, at least 10 times bigger than the gold markets. It's the entire financial system. The entire financial system is kind of hard to put a number on, but it's certainly bigger than the gold markets. And so it's really almost infinite. And it's just now that Ethereum is coming out of the dark ages. And that's why you're seeing a lot of these ETH Treasury trades, because there's a formal classification of Ethereum becoming a commodity and so on. And so you're going to finally see Ethereum's valuation go up. But to answer your question, Ryan, it's very difficult to know what the total value is
11:38 Speaker 00 of the entire financial system, but a lot of bank functions, a lot of contract lawyers, a lot of escrow agents, a lot of friction that's not necessary, that can be completely removed using solidity, using smart contracts, using atomic swaps in Ethereum. That's all going to happen. That's my thesis.
12:00 Ryan Sean Adams? Okay, so you mentioned the key here is you've got to be, to do anything big, to be successful, you've got to be a little bit extreme. Okay, so let's measure how extreme you are and how extreme BitDigital is right now, which is, I can measure this, quantify this by the amount of ETH you own. So how much does BitDigital own right now? And where does that place you in the ranking of ETH Treasury companies?
12:23 Speaker 00 Well, I know there are a lot of ETH Treasury companies coming out, but I think we're behind Joe's aspect. I just had a chat with him a week and a half ago. You know, right now they're ranked ahead of us, but this race just started and there's going to be some friendly competition. We're just over 100,000 now. That was our first salvo. And we're currently cooking on the next tranche. And so it's going to be a race and I'm a very competitive person. And this actually started Frankly, years ago, we actually started putting Ethereum in our balance sheet. And we have a real business, by the way, we didn't just grab a shell and do this play. We had, we had a Bitcoin mining business.
13:07 Speaker 00 We even have a data center business. One of our subsidiaries is a, is a, is a, an AI infrastructure company that's doing extremely well with over a hundred million dollars of contracted revenues per year and growing exponentially. So we actually have a real business. We have a profitable Bitcoin mining business that I declared that we're no longer going to invest in. The infrastructure business for AI is different, but we actually have real businesses in our company. We didn't just grab a shell. So that's a huge difference between us and the others. No one else has that, nobody else. They are just grabbing, they're just grabbing shell companies and pumping that up.
13:50 Speaker 00 We actually have a real, truly real business with locked up revenues that last for years. These contracts that we have are years, so kind of different.
14:00 David Hoffman? So with all of the Ether Treasury companies out there, Sharpling Gaming, they're coming in at the number one spot with about 205,000 ETH. And then we have Bit Digital, your company, at 100,000 ETH. And then third place, very far in the third with just 15,000 ETH, that's BTCS Inc. So like you talked about, this is, you guys are frenemies, you know, friendly competition. You're very competitive. I'm assuming what that means is that you want to see your company to be the number one spot, the number one ETH holder treasury company.
14:27 Speaker 00 Absolutely.
14:28 David Hoffman? When you see other ETH companies like coming online or raising more money or, you know, otherwise doing well, are you like, how, how do you think about these things? Like, is that like, oh, there, there's more energy happening outside of my company? Or are you thinking in the, in like, oh, there's more momentum going into ETH in the first place, which is going to make my job easier? So how, how does just the sheer number of ETH treasury companies online, making your job harder? Or is it making your job easier?
14:59 Speaker 00 It's a weird, I love the question. So there is this weird tension with there's more Ethereum, there's more of these plays, so they're going to buy Ethereum, so the price of Ethereum is going to go up. So that's nice. That's good. And then from a financial perspective, it comforts me, but from a mindshare perspective, it doesn't, right? Because you could only have so many of these ETH trades. You see it right now with respect to Bitcoin, the Bitcoin capital markets proxy of like these trades is saturated. So you can't have like, you can't have like more than 20 ETH treasury trades, because then the mindshare pie just doesn't work. So that's why it's very important to be aggressive, just to get that mindshare. But,
15:44 Speaker 00 you know, at the same time, all this friendly competition is good for the Ethereum ecosystem and the price and the awareness. And, you know, again, it's friendly competition. I've known Joe for a long time. I co-founded a company called Fluidity, it was an Ethereum company, and the team built AirSwap. And then in 2020, we sold the company to Joe Lubin. So the relationship goes back many years. And so, you know, the story, the journey in Ethereum continues.
16:18 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, it's really a matter of like, I think when people are valuing these ETH treasury companies are kind of like sizing everybody up, like, you know, it's like, what are the different skills on the, you know, the Avengers that have assembled here, the ETH treasury Avengers here? And we've already mentioned Joe Lubin and Sharplink Gaming. David mentioned another firm, BTCS. They've got, I think, they announced this week, another 225 million raise that has not yet converted into a buy, but they're trying to get more funds in order to buy ETH. So those are some competitors. And also, a couple of weeks ago, Tom Lee from Wall Street entered the fray here. And I've been watching Tom Lee on Wall Street for like, I don't know, the past
16:58 Ryan Sean Adams? like 10 years, talking about crypto. He's got Bitmine Immersion Technologies and 250 million buy. It's really a race to the first treasury firm to a billion dollars worth of ETH. I've also also saw this week Game. This is another company that wasn't even on my radar, 100 million that they're trying to buy in ETH.
17:20 Speaker 00 Great ticker.
17:21 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, yeah, it's a great ticker. They also had, you know, the game streamer Ninja. He's somehow like involved as a chief innovation officer. So I don't know how all that works. There's a lot of competition here, but also I've heard, you know, people like Tom, for instance, mentioned that, hey, there might be some consolidation here at some point. So like, are you gonna buy Tom Lee or is he gonna buy you, Sam? What do you think, man?
17:47 Speaker 00 I saw that quote, and I mean, if he's for sale, I'm happy to consider it.
17:54 Ryan Sean Adams? There you go. I love that energy.
17:57 Speaker 00 Well, you know, just in terms of these ETH treasury trades being launched, I think I saw this funny meme. I think it was even on yours, Ryan, but it was a meme where like, you gotta start at 100,000 or you're basically, you're just mini me. Like you have to, you have to start at 100,000 ETH in order to like make a statement. And then anything below that, you're gonna be in the long tail.
18:21 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, I won't take credit for that meme, but I believe I saw that too. And it was Joe Lubin's baldness and then it was literally mini me from the Austin Powers. He's baldness and that's what you look like if you're 100, under 100,000 ETH. That's the entry price here.
18:35 Speaker 00 It is the entry price. I agree. I think that's the number and let's see who gets to a billion first.
18:41 David Hoffman? Okay, Sam, so we're talking about the sheer number of treasury companies that are coming online, not just in Ethereum, but just broadly across the space. It has just become a huge theme inside of just the traditional stock market. You talked about earlier how Sailor just built this thing and it's a real thing. You emphasize it being a real thing. A lot of people's instincts in crypto, if they've seen a cycle or two, their instincts are like kind of perking up and like, oh, I know this pattern. There's a pattern. It's kind of, you know, filling up with hot air. There's copycats. They're also filling up with hot air and eventually this whole thing pops. And so like people are all kind of like gearing up for, you know, maybe it's bullish for six months. Maybe we could get six months of bullish price action, but then it pops.
19:23 David Hoffman? And then other people I've heard say, well, actually, no, like structurally, the thing is designed to not pop. Structurally, it's sound. Maybe you could like walk us through your thinking on that debate.
19:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, I think that the long tail, I think some players in the long tail will pop. I think that'll collapse if you're in the long tail. But if you're in the top three, I think it won't. People have like cognitive overload issues if there are just too many of these ETH treasury plays. And of course, you can calculate the NAV and you can make these like apples to apples comparison. Ours is a little bit more complicated because we have an actual real business in our, in our structure. That's making a lot of money. So it's, it's a little bit difficult to do apples and apples since all the other guys are shell, shell companies.
20:14 Speaker 00 I think, but mathematically, David, like to that, to the metaphor of the, these oil companies and the reason why they were trading. Their NAV was trading above the valuation of their proven oil reserves is because the markets expected them to find more oil reserves. And so, so long as the market has a perception that you're going to continue buying more ETH mathematically. You're going to have, you're going to be trading above your, your, the valuation, the assets under your NAV. So I think that's how it works, but there are mind share issues. There's cognitive overload issues and that is something where I think the top three can enjoy. But I think after that, the long tail of, of, of people who are doing it, it may not work out.
21:00 Ryan Sean Adams? What, what do you think of the risks here, Sam? Cause we're trying to get a, a hold of that too. So there's premium to NAV, of course, and that can be generated, has been generated. I think there's definitely the case for, for that being generated. But the nightmare scenario, and we've seen some things previously, not in the treasury form, but in previous cycles. We've seen GBDC trusts, for instance, trade at a deficit to NAV for a long period of time. And that was, that was weird, that was scary, that destabilized a lot of things in crypto. What's the risk there for, I guess, your company and ETH treasury companies in general?
21:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, I never understood that mathematically. There was another company I had ETH and it was in Canada and had a great name and it had the word ETH in it.
21:43 David Hoffman? It was like Ether Capital, I think.
21:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, it was Ether Capital. That's right. And it always, you know, as I was building my ETH on our balance sheet, we had tens of billions on our balance sheet. And I remember looking at Ether Capital and just scratching my head, wondering why they were trading above, below NAV. I was confused. So that, I'll be honest with you, gave me pause. And then when Joe Lubin did Sbat, I was like, all right. I should have been first at this. And my doubts, my doubts, including the examples that you came up, you brought up, kind of went away. And so I, you know, worked very hard and to get this to market very quickly. And so now we're off to the races.
22:28 Speaker 00 But yeah, it was weird that some of those other companies, it didn't really work out the way it should. And I think it's related to mindshare and people paying attention. And now people are paying a lot of attention and they're realizing that there's a combination, there's like a virtuous perfect storm. There's regulatory clarity, right? That helps Ethereum. The investigations against all these projects on Ethereum are not like they used to be under Gary Gensler. So that's very good for Ethereum. You have Bitcoin just had a huge run and there are so many people in the space who feel like they've kind of lost.
23:07 Speaker 00 They kind of missed their chance with Bitcoin, but Ethereum is not at all time highs like Bitcoin. So now they feel perhaps there's like juice in Ethereum and I truly believe there is. There's more developers now in Ethereum than there was when, during all time highs. So now with the regulatory clarity and all the development activity going on and all these stable coins that are now about to be built. And more than, more than half of stable coins are built on Ethereum. I think people are starting to understand that Ethereum is about to have its day.
23:40 David Hoffman? Sam, the way that I think about these treasury companies is that there's really two core ingredients that goes into them to really make them work. The first is RIS and then the second is Alchemy. And RIS is just your ability to promote, your ability to capture mindshare as you've been putting it, really your ability to really. Preach about the nature of the asset that the company is collecting. And so that's the first one. And then the second one is alchemy, which is, you know, Michael Saylor has just done a pretty remarkable job doing some financial engineering to really just squeeze the juice, squeeze the sponge out of the capital credit markets in TradFi. And he's, you know, so he has the master equity, he has all of these coupon bonds, he has different tiers of stuff to just max out every possible line of credit.
24:24 David Hoffman? Talk to us about the alchemy side of things. What kind of like ingredients you have cooking over there?
24:30 Speaker 00 I mean, the financial engineering that Michael Saylor uses is all public information. It's a public company. We see the financial instruments he's using. We're going to use exactly the same financial instruments. And so that, that is, you know, again, we're, I'm plagiarizing that shamelessly. So that's the, that's the financial engineering part. And with respect to the RIS, I mean, I can't, I'm not going to claim RIS, but I'm going to do my very best to explain to the markets and to our audience and to whoever is going to listen to me, why Ethereum and why now? And the utility of Ethereum and why that has the ability to rewrite the financial system, which is not something that can be done with Bitcoin. I'll do my very best.
25:15 Ryan Sean Adams? There's another piece of alchemy that comes into play with Ether, the asset that's really just not available to Bitcoin. And that is making use of Ether, the asset productively. So of course, the kind of the risk-free quote unquote way to do this is you just stake your ETH. And you, coming from kind of a company that did Bitcoin mining, validating blocks for Bitcoin essentially in exchange for issuance and rewards. You know that very well, how that works in Bitcoin. So I guess my question is, what are you going to be doing with your Ether in general to increase yields? You can, of course, stake, you can get into some more exotic DeFi types of things with the Ether and generate returns that way. That has different level of risk and reward.
25:57 Ryan Sean Adams? But at the end of the day, I think a lot of the, the premium to NAV is going to be based on your ability to generate the highest amount of ETH per share in of course, like a risk adjusted way. So tell us about that type of alchemy. What are you going to be doing with the ETH?
26:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's a great question. So most entities such as ETFs are just passively holding crypto, holding ETH. We're taking a more active approach. We're staking all our ETH and operating validators, which generates yield. So that puts the capital to work and reflects a deeper operational commitment to Ethereum. It's interesting that ETH ETFs cannot stake. They don't have the legal ability to do that for now. So that puts us at a competitive advantage to ETFs because we're earning yield and that compounds. And in terms of yield and using more alpha maneuvers to juice up yields, you're right, we have to, we are looking at that already. And we have to be a little bit careful as well as balancing the risk reward
26:58 Speaker 00 trade off on that. But we are planning on being a little bit more aggressive on the risk curve to make sure that our yields are above average. So that's what we're doing now. And I think that's true, Ryan. Like, I would like to put out ideally, in fact, I think I'm gonna commit to it, I'll commit to it, that every month, we're gonna show our ETH holdings. And if there's a way to show our yield, I would like to show that too, because I would like to call out the other companies and see if they could show their yields. And we could, you know, perhaps, you know, the audience in the markets can compare us with our peers and see who is generating more yield for their ETH. And I think that would be, that would be really good. And of
27:43 Speaker 00 course, you know, you got to disclose what risks you're taking. So I think that'll be a good thing to do. And I think that should be done monthly.
27:50 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, that's fantastic. So I guess this is not only a reef, sorry, a race reef, a race to acquire the most amount of ETH between all these treasury companies. It's also a race for more yields on that ETH as well. And one of the things that I love about this is, I think there are a lot of traditional investors, Wall Street investors, who just, for whatever reason, structure, like, you know, concern, I think a lot of this is structure, though, they just can't dabble in ETH yields and DeFi yields at all. There's no mechanism for allowing them to do that. As you pointed out, you can't get that. In the ETH ETFs and a lot of them just aren't structured to be able to use you know, like non custodial wallets and kind of like, how do they do this? Where do they park their assets?
28:33 Ryan Sean Adams? And so these ETH treasury companies can be a vehicle to unlock a whole lot of capital. In addition to showing them what ETH can do inside of the Ethereum economy as a productive asset. It's part of this is about just like saying, hey, Wall Street, look at our books. Look at our yield, look what we're doing with our ETH. You can go do that too. And so I think that is a very bullish statement and it's a differentiator when it comes to Bitcoin, which is much more of a, you know, it just, it just stays there. It's not generating the yield. There's no staking mechanism. So that's definitely a positive for, for this stuff. I want to ask another, yeah, maybe reflect on that. And then I got another question for you.
29:12 Speaker 00 Sure. I mean, look, we serve both institutional and retail investors for institutions. I guess we, we offer a regulated liquid way to access ETH and, and staking rewards without, without them managing custody or infrastructure. And for retail, you know, it's an accessible way to participate in Ethereum's upside through the stock market. So it solves both retail and institutional needs by offering both the ETH exposure and the staking rewards.
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31:32 Ryan Sean Adams? It's incredible how fast all these ETH treasuries have really developed. I mean, just like a month ago, you know, like six weeks ago, there was literally nothing. There was nothing. Now we've got like at least five in a race to a billion. And actually, there's, there's more that I've heard rumor of that are coming up.
31:48 David Hoffman? There are at least two more.
31:50 Ryan Sean Adams? Yeah, this is all moving very, very, very, very fast. And Sam, another trend, aside from ETH treasuries going public, is the, the, the trend of former Bitcoin mining companies actually converting to this ETH treasury strategy. And of course, you would be one of those, but it's Tom, Tom Lee's company, BitMine Immersion Technologies. I believe this used to be a Bitcoin mining company. As well as, I gotta think the other ETH treasury company, BTCs, I think the B probably stands for something like, like Bitcoin. And you with BitDigital, you used to be a mining company, now moving to ETH treasury and ETH staking. Do you think this is a trend that will continue? And why is it?
32:33 Ryan Sean Adams? Is, was Mike, was part of Michael Saylor right that like, hey, Bitcoin mining is kind of a shit business? Like, it's really hard. And like, maybe this is a better way to kind of maximize. The the capital and also the intellectual capital that that you've already built up. Do you think this is a trend that will continue?
32:49 Speaker 00 Yes, Bitcoin miners already know that Bitcoin mining is not a promising business. This is a business that guarantees that your profits are halved, are taken out 50% every four years. Imagine being in a business where your profits are guaranteed to be cut in half every four years. And you have to buy the latest hardware. And so you have to dilute your shareholders and to raise the money to buy this hardware that lasts for like not very long. And so it's just this hamster wheel where you're trying to squeeze out whatever profits you can before the next halving. And on top of that, the hash rate is going up. So it makes it even more difficult to squeeze the profits.
33:30 Speaker 00 And then I tell you what, I guarantee it almost that if Bitcoin gets to 200 or 300,000, and it probably will eventually. And by the way, with Bitcoin going up, it doesn't mean that the Bitcoin miners make more money. That's not how it works because you have to look at the hash rate and so on. But putting that aside, if Bitcoin gets to 300,000, then the sovereigns are going to come in. You're going to have companies, you're going to have countries that have basically free access to power and like Bitcoin miners. And so they're going to really go for it and they're going to start minting their own Bitcoin. And the Bitcoin mining companies are not going to be able to compete with that and they're going to go out of business. That's why you're seeing a lot of Bitcoin miners doing either two things.
34:12 Speaker 00 Leveraging their skill set to go into GPU, the GPU business. Or basically transferring themselves from Bitcoin to Ethereum. Because that's a much more valuable way to maximize shareholder value. And so, yeah, Michael Saylor was right in that meeting. We didn't agree on everything, but we did agree on his thesis that Bitcoin mining is a shit business.
34:38 Ryan Sean Adams? Do you think that becomes a problem? Like, I mean, I think all of us in crypto, obviously, we want the best for Bitcoin. We want it to succeed.
34:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, absolutely.
34:46 Ryan Sean Adams? Do you think that that could cause a problem over the long run? So what we're seeing is maybe the the flight of smaller. Bitcoin mining companies and they have to kind of abandon the business. And so you get a lot of consolidation. I mean, we were talking to Paulo from Tether not too long ago. He's got 100 million, sorry, 100,000 Bitcoin on his balance sheet. And he's like launching the largest Bitcoin miner just to make sure that he can still produce blocks. When the subsidies, the inflation issuance subsidies for Bitcoin kind of go away. That halving that you discussed over four years time. But if you kind of play that forward a little bit, doesn't it? Does it become the case that Bitcoin mining gets more and more consolidated? Fewer and few players, there's no longer room.
35:32 Ryan Sean Adams? Like it just seems to be the issuance policy of Bitcoin that that would be the case. And you see a time when, you know, transaction fees on Bitcoin are basically all time lows. Because everyone is holding Bitcoin. They're not, they're not moving it on chain or they're leveraging, they're getting access to it through, you know, like Michael Saylor and other ETFs.
35:51 Speaker 00 Right.
35:51 Ryan Sean Adams? Is this a concern to you over time? I mean, I know we don't want to besmirch Bitcoin, but it just seems to be like a growing concern in the network itself.
36:00 Speaker 00 Right. I mean, there's a reason why we exited the business.
36:06 Speaker 00 That's why we exited the business. It's just not a promising future in that business. And those who continue to become, say, you know, become pure plays on Bitcoin and just being stubborn about it. I mean, I wish them luck and I, and some of, some of those guys are my friends. I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to like prematurely dance on their graves or anything, but it's just a very difficult business. And it's just not promising because it just becomes harder and harder to squeeze out a profit. And there's going to be a point where you need basically free access to energy. Your energy costs have to be basically zero for your Bitcoin mining to, to work. And I don't think any Bitcoin miner has free access to power. Only countries do.
36:48 Speaker 00 And once Bitcoin gets to about 300,000 or so, countries will just get involved in Bitcoin mining. And then the hash rate, the hash difficulty looks load upwards. And then it's going to be very difficult for Bitcoin miners to be profitable. And then you have the halving coming up and then it's just game over.
37:05 David Hoffman? Well, countries mining Bitcoin actually doesn't really sound like there's a problem with the Bitcoin security budget in that scenario.
37:12 Speaker 00 I guess not.
37:13 Ryan Sean Adams? So Sam, all this brings up the question of how big do you think this could grow? And I run the risk of somebody correcting me in the comments because I'm just like remembering some numbers on the fly, but I think the total amount of Bitcoin in ETFs right now is something like 6% of total supply. It's closer to 3% for Ether, but that number is kind of ratcheting up. And I don't know the total amount of Bitcoin in Bitcoin treasury companies, but God, how much does Sailor have? He's got to be close to, you know, 2% to 3% of all supply, something like that. And we are less than half a percent of all Ether supply in treasury companies right now, right? And of course, that is just like from, you know, gone up from zero about six weeks ago.
37:56 Ryan Sean Adams? Question to you is how big do you think ETH treasury could actually grow? Maybe as a portion of supply, maybe in terms of, you know, billions of dollars, however you measure this, is it going to be as big as Bitcoin?
38:07 Speaker 00 I think it will be, but I hope it's not fully concentrated on one party because there is, there is sometimes I wonder like when you, Michael Saylor, it's just like all this is concentrated on one guy. And when you're that much of a percentage in the entire supply, it's not a good thing, actually. It's, it's a bad thing. And I'm sure people who understand decentralization, decentralizations, they agree with that. So I, I, I hope it's basically, you know, my, my, I really hope that it's basically a top three horses and it'll be as big as Bitcoin, but it's going to be shared amongst the three, just, and there's a friendly competition amongst the three.
38:50 Speaker 00 That's, that's what I hope will end up happening. And I, I hope there isn't a, an MSTR of Bitcoin, although I'm aiming to be that, but the others are too. And I just think if there's like one giant MSTR that, and that dwarfs everybody else, then you have sort of a key man risk. And that's what I think is happening right now with Bitcoin. You have a giant key man risk with Michael Saylor.
39:17 Ryan Sean Adams? Sam, as we bring this conversation to a close, we've talked about your ETH treasury company. We've, of course, mentioned all the other ETH treasury companies that are out there. As we close, inform our listeners about what sets yours apart. Why is yours special?
39:31 Speaker 00 Well, ours is very different for a couple of reasons. First, we have an underlying business. And secondly, I think it's just basically, you know, I'll call it rate of aggression. Like, we're gonna be as very, as active as possible in buying Ethereum. And I think S bet has set the standard. And I, and I think that's great. That's the standard to beat. And I, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna do our best. We already have a roadmap. We're, we're gonna be executing that roadmap in order to, to be, to be placed at number one. And that's all I can say. There is another thing I'd like to say is that I, I didn't just wake up and think, oh, wow, this is a very sexy thing to do. Let's do it. I've been in the Ethereum space for a very long time, since 2017.
40:14 Speaker 00 When I, when I became CEO of Bitcoin, of Bit Digital, I almost immediately said, let's put some Ethereum in our balance sheet. And we had more Ethereum in our balance sheet than anybody except Coinbase before S bet came on. So, but we didn't market it. We didn't talk about it. We staked that whole thing. So we had the pipes, the infrastructure. We already had that going. And so this is not something we just woke up and thought, hey, this is trendy. Let's take what, let's take advantage of it. This is something we've been building for a long time.
40:42 Ryan Sean Adams? Well, Sam, we're so glad you stopped by. Best of luck on this mission. We want you to propagate this far and wide, of course. I think David and I have talked about Ether and Ethereum for a very long time. But to crypto natives, this is crypto media. We want you to go forth and talk to CNBC, get on Bloomberg, talk to traditional finance as well. Because I don't think the story of Ethereum, and even more importantly, Ether, the asset, has propagated as far as it should. And I think part of what you're doing with your treasury is to make that happen. So, thank you for your work. I know you've got some important meetings coming up. We appreciate you stopping by.
41:16 Speaker 00 Thanks, Ryan. Thanks, David.
41:17 Ryan Sean Adams? Bankers Station, gotta let you know, none of this has been financial advice. Of course, crypto assets are risky. So are ETH treasury companies. They can be at least. Lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.
Previous 6 Levels of Wealth with Nick Maggiulli | Author of The Wealth Ladder Next ROLLUP: $4 Trillion Market Cap | GENIUS Act | ETH ETF Mania Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
