Andrew Keys - Inside The Ether Machine: A $2.5 Billion Wall Street Treasury Company

Watch The Full Episode: http://londonreal.tv/keys 💸 Dive deep into the crypto-finance vortex with Brian Rose and Andrew Keys as they unravel the secrets behind a $2.5B Wall Street treasury titan 🏦. From Ethereum's disruptive power ⚡ to institutional adoption and blockchain's future 🔮, this episode of "Inside The Ether Machine" delivers high-stakes insight, bold predictions, and raw truth 💥. Whether you're a crypto veteran or finance newbie, this convo is your backstage pass to the digital money revolution. 🚨 Learn To Make Money In Crypto: 💰The Investment club: https://londonreal.tv/club 💰Crypto & DeFi Academy: https://londonreal.tv/defi

• 0:01Speaker 00

  What Ethereum serves for is a global settlement layer to the economy of the world.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Why does anyone want exposure to ETH?

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Ether is a yield generating asset, like a digital version of oil. And due to its proof of stake, we're able to intrinsically generate yield from Ether. We're going to see all of the major financial institutions following suit as Ethereum continues to cement itself as this global settlement layer of humanity. Our operating vehicle model, unlike the ETFs, enables public market investors to have access to the full productivity of Ether yield.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  One of the big things about you, Andrew, is I think you put in about 650 million of your own supply of ETH, which gives you a ton of cred.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  For me, with my assets, that was the only way I could get comfortable with this model.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  What does Ether Machine look like a year from now?

• 0:55Speaker 00

  We aspire to be number one. We're maniacally focused on generating Ether concentration per share at the most minimal risk.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  You've been in this business for over 10 years. You still seem very excited about this, and I don't see any gray hair.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  I don't think I have physical gray hair, but know that I have spiritual gray hair. I am still excited today as I was a decade ago. In the end, what I'm doing is going to be one of multiple pillars that can give public market investors exposure to the asset class, but also be a microphone to explain how Ethereum works to society.

• 1:43Speaker 01

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  It can be scary. That's why you gotta turn your trust to club. Pull the trigger. Let's do this.

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  This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is...

• 3:39Speaker 01

  This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Andrew Keyes, the entrepreneur, Ethereum pioneer, and CEO of The Ether Machine. You began your career in traditional finance before joining Consensus in 2014, where you helped scale Ethereum to global adoption. Later, you co-founded Dharma Capital, bringing institutional discipline to digital assets. Today, as CEO of The Ether Machine, you're leading a $2.5 billion Ethereum treasury that accumulates, stakes, and actively manages ETH as the reserve asset of the internet. With a planned NASDAQ listing, you aim to create the world's first pure-play, dedicated Ethereum treasury company, designed from the ground up for ETH accumulation

• 4:22Speaker 01

  and institutional-grade yield generation. Andrew, welcome to London Real.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me, Brian.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Look, it's great to have you here, and I just want to jump right into it. You know, for people that don't fully understand what you're doing, can you just break it down and explain what is an Ethereum treasury company? Why do we need them? And why are we seeing so many launching in the last, I don't know, 60 days? It's like you, you got Tom Lee's BitMine, you got your old buddy Joe Lubin, and what he's doing, obviously, over at Sharplink. Why now, and why do we need these things?

• 4:58Speaker 00

  So, we'll start with why now. I think there have been a confluence of factors that have created this Cambrian explosion. First and foremost, in December of 2024, so approximately eight months ago, there was an update through the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the FASB, defining that digital assets like Ether could be marked to market within a public company. So basically, what that did was, was, was basically greenlight the ability to hold these assets on balance sheet and to be properly accounted for.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  It was kind of another step, albeit a boring one and an accounting nuance. And we think that that was kind of the, the, the light of the match of, of why this started to make sense. Another reason is that I learned personally that ETFs were an inferior way to express one's interest specifically in Ether. And the reason of that is a bit of a technical nuance. And, and, and that's something to do with what's called the withdrawal queue within Ethereum. Right now, the ETFs in America do not enable staking.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  We believe that that's going to happen soon. But in Europe or in Canada as a proxy, staking is enabled. And what, what we've seen is they're staking at what I would call 50% Capacity, meaning if you had a billion euros in a staking, excuse me, in an Ethereum E T P in Europe, they're only staking five hundred million euros and they're only earning the vanilla floor, meaning that they're only earning the table stakes staking yield, which right now is about three percent. So on the billion dollars, five hundred millions being staked, and that's earning three percent to really generate a one point five percent yield on the total amount of capital.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  And the reason this occurs is because in Ethereum, if you were to unstate your assets today, you should get it back in a couple of days. But if, God forbid, there was a bad hack or some type of black swan event where lots of stakers wanted to unstate at the same time, the withdrawal due to unstate could grow from a couple of days to months or even a year. And that doesn't jive well with the E T F requirements to have twenty four hour redemptions. So if you were to redeem your your stock, the E T Fs have to be able to sell that out and give you your your fiat currency within twenty four hours.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  And there's no way, because this is denominated in ether, it's not even denominated in dollars, there's not a way to to basically underwrite that risk. So the so the best thing that the E T Ps, the E T Fs can do is just stake less. And and so with that said, I had previously been building a commodity pool operator and commodity trading advisor registered with the C F T C because ether is a commodity that staked institutional size billions of of dollars of ether already since the inception of proof of stake. And when I understood that I could basically have a public vehicle.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  That unlike the ETFs could stake at full capacity, something that we were already doing. And then furthermore, we could add additional yield generation through concepts like restaking and participation in DeFi. I thought of this like a perpetual bond and Ethereum should be considered, let's quote from the yield generation dynamics, as a perpetual bond, where it is able to generate this yield. And I compared it to what one would be able to achieve through the ETF. If you double the yield, you essentially double the price of that bond. And basically, what we saw is the ETFs really are only able

• 9:24Speaker 00

  to do 50% capacity of the first third of yield generation activities, which is vanilla staking, and they're not able to do restaking and participation of DeFi. So we're able to do all three of those buckets, plus we're able to add what I would just call the capital markets financial instruments, such as creating convertible bonds and/or preferred shares to further add to our North Star, which is our Ether concentration per share.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Okay, and you can also add on top of that, some of the exotic yield generating instruments, like the restaking and things like that?

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Okay, and so what looked like a problem for the ETF, you're taking advantage of that and creating a brand new product that can solve that issue?

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  And that issue isn't going to get solved anytime soon? I mean, you talk about that whole issue of unstaking and that unknown time delay, does that mean it will be difficult to get a staking-based ETF for ETH?

• 10:32Speaker 00

  So I think that a staking-based ETF will occur, but I don't think that they're going to be able to stake at full capacity. They and if they basically, I think that they have they have kind of two roadmaps to do, or paths, if you will. One is they could stake and they're going to stake at, you know, maybe it's 50%, 60% capacity. Or they could stake potentially using what's called a liquid staking token. But that introduces other vectors, you know, other attack vectors. You're talking about introducing smart contract risk. And you're now introducing vectors of the bid-ask spread

• 11:16Speaker 00

  between a liquid staking token and just pure vanilla Ether, which is basically adding another transaction. What I think is a much better mousetrap is having an operating company that has a business to secure Ethereum and to generate yield and to avail ourselves to the full suite of Ethereum's productivity, which is staking, restaking and participation in DeFi. Plus, on the traditional financial side of the equation, the ability to add to sell convertible bonds and/or preferred shares

• 11:59Speaker 00

  to volatility-seeking or credit-seeking investors and using the proceeds of that to add Ether to our balance sheet for shareholders that want Ether concentration to increase per share.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Okay, and I definitely want to get into that. You could argue that Michael Saylor kind of wrote the book on that for Bitcoin.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  And I want to get to that. But if we zoomed out really, really, really high up and we took a look at 30,000 feet. If an institution, or a person I guess, wants exposure to Ethereum, they kind of have maybe three-ish choices. They can buy the Ethereum somehow and find a wallet to hold it in and keep it safe, which could be challenging. They can buy the ETF now and not get any yield component, but they can have the exposure. Or they could go and buy some Ether Machine or an Ethereum Treasury company. Are those kind of the three options for any type of size? And could you walk people through the problems with those? I think you kind of talked about the ETF there, and maybe how a lot of institutions, I mean, Saylor was just on CNBC two days ago, and he said 98% of the institutions in the world cannot

• 13:05Speaker 01

  hold crypto. And so that's not even an option, but they all have accounts on the New York Stock Exchange.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  Exactly. So first and foremost, one can go acquire Ether Spot, and let's say, use a retail exchange. They now are responsible for the public-private key pair, hacking, et cetera, and/or hiding the ledger under their bed, and keeping the 12-worded seed phrase. And then if they were to use any one of these retail exchanges, back in the napkin, they charge 25% of the staking yield that they generate. So that's the first

• 13:51Speaker 00

  example. Secondarily, the ETFs, as we just discussed, is like owning a stock that has a dividend, but availing yourself to suss the dividend that you're entitled to, or in case of the US right now, 0% of the dividend, because right now in the ETFs, they are not enabling staking yield. And then furthermore, it's really availing yourselves, because ETFs are somewhat rigid in their exposure to what you can do with the underlying asset.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  They haven't been created specifically for a productive asset, what I would call kind of like this triple-point asset of Ether that can derive value multiple ways, where you can have it from staking, from restaking, and participation in DeFi. You're really only able to do that first third. And then these operating vehicles, done properly...

• 14:59Speaker 00

  We believe is the best way to do it. And then there are nuances within the operating vehicles that we can touch on and kind of why we chose to go in our route, which was creating a de novo entity with a SPAC versus doing a reverse takeover of a shell. But I'll digress, but basically, I think our operating vehicle model enables in public market investors to have access to the full yield, or excuse me, the full productivity of Ether yield, staking, restaking, and DeFi, and the full product suite that an equity

• 15:39Speaker 00

  operating business can enable, such as ATM equity issuance, preferred shares, and convertible bonds.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Excellent. Okay, I want to get into that. Before we do, why does anyone want exposure to ETH? We clearly have seen the use case, and Sailor kind of built that up. He's been on our show back in 21, and back in 22 and 23. And obviously, at the time, I think that was the only crypto that was kind of blessed, or at least being ignored by the SEC. And so he went full bore, and we saw that. Now Ethereum, the ETF came a little bit later. It was slow to get started, but now we're seeing more and more interest. The regulations go in our way. Stablecoin Act is passed. When I got to Wall Street at the ripe age of 22 years old, I was 1993, and I got sat on the fixed income derivatives desk.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  And all my friends, when I used to go home in the East Village, said, Brian, what stock do I buy? And I said, stocks? Stocks are for punks. We work in fixed income. And in fixed income, it's all about yields, right? Everything is, what's my overnight rate? What's my three-month rate? What's my 30-year rate? And I grew up in this environment of yield. And so when I used to look at crypto, I would always tell people, you know what? When Wall Street comes, they don't even understand something that doesn't have a yield. And so are we finally seeing them embrace an instrument with an inherent yield, an inherent even a yield curve? Is that why ETH is going to be the next big thing, do you think?

• 17:09Speaker 00

  So that's one of, I would call, three reasons. And we can start there. So first and foremost, Ether is a yield generating asset, uh, you know, versus Bitcoin. Uh, Bitcoin, I consider unproductive, kind of like gold and, and, and ether is like a digital version of oil. For every transaction that occurs on the Ethereum blockchain, it requires a micropayment of this fuel. And due to its proof of stake consensus mechanism, uh, we're able to intrinsically generate yield from ether, unlike Bitcoin that requires real estate, hardware and electricity consumption.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  You don't need any of that with this upgraded, uh, way to form consensus, uh, through proof of stake. So, so one, you do have this yield generation aspect. Secondarily, uh, to understand this public markets play, one needs to understand kind of, uh, who is, who are the stakeholders? And one of the major stakeholders are the, the shareholders that are buying, uh, the underlying stock, uh, because they want ether exposure and the, the generation of yield and to, uh, have the increase of their ether concentration per share.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  So simply put, if you had, uh, basically an ETF, you're just getting kind of the ether exposure and you can kind of think of that as, you know, one time. But with this, you have a vehicle that is constantly generating additional ether. So your ether concentration should be continuously appreciating. So you have kind of ether exposure plus.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  And then the other stakeholders in this are the convertible bond and or preferred shared consumers. And, and we'll simply put, uh, we'll, we'll do the convertible bonds to kind of keep it simple. So basically there are hedge funds and other investors that are actually in the business. Of acquiring volatility. They don't necessarily care if it's via Bitcoin, whether it's via Ether or whether it's via data centers. But basically, they can acquire volatility in a stock. And what they do is they'll acquire a convertible bond. And they could potentially short the stock or an ETF linked to instrument.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Uh, and, and you know, like, for example, the BlackRock Ether ETF. And, and basically live delta neutral, uh, but basically, uh, earning off of the volatility. And, and for this Ether is double the volatility of Bitcoin.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  How do you get out of a rat race? How do you create wealth not only for yourself, but also for the generations to come after?

• 20:14Speaker 04

  I am absolutely amazed with the quality of companies that we're getting exposure to.

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  We go on to Zoom calls with the innovators and the folks who are building new applications in Metaverse, Blockchain, artificial intelligence, decentralized finance.

• 20:29Speaker 06

  What's going on, everybody? Thumbs up if you can see me. We are focusing on early-stage investment.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  And the quality of people that we're getting exposure to, whether it be Dan Tapia with OneRT, Jason Ma from Open, Yatsu from Anamoka.

• 20:44Speaker 05

  This has been a phenomenal experience thus far. It has far exceeded my expectations.

• 20:49Speaker 06

  We are focusing on cutting-edge technologies.

• 20:53Speaker 05

  I view it now as the best investment I have ever made. The upside, I view, is unlimited.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  And as a retail investor, I would never get this exposure anywhere else outside of Investment Club. See you in the Investment Club.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Plus, it is now, uh, as we previously said, generating yield. So basically, this is just a better asset for this convertible bond flywheel. And if you are kind of a historian of micro strategy, what really grew it from single-digit billions of valuation to centibillion?

• 21:30Speaker 00

  Was not the ATM equity issuance, but it was the introduction of convertible bonds and preferred shares, where basically, we view that as a positive sum game, where we're selling volatility to investors who are looking for volatility, and then we're using those proceeds to buy the underlying asset, in this case Ether, for the shareholders that want exposure to Ether and the yield that Ether generates. So I would say those are very kind of like technical factors, the yield generation and the volatility. But last, but probably not, and certainly not least,

• 22:14Speaker 00

  is, you know, what is Ethereum? You know, and why is that important? So basically, I believe Ethereum to be the substrate of the next generation of the Internet. And there was a really good artifact that was recently produced by Consensus, my alma mater, called the Ethereum Trust Report. And I would recommend that everyone Google Consensus Ethereum Trust. And there's a graph that we can put in the show notes that depicts high-quality liquid assets, HQLA, which is this term by the Financial Accounting Standards Body. And basically, right now,

• 22:58Speaker 00

  there's only about $250 billion of high-quality liquid assets on blockchains, which is a drop in the bucket, meaning we're in the, you know, the earliest, earliest days of this transition from a natively analog world to a natively digital world, where our assets are natively digitized. That said...

• 23:23Speaker 00

  The $250 billion of assets, 90% of those $250 billion of assets are being settled to Ethereum. And Ethereum is experiencing power law dynamics similar to Google with search, where 90% plus of those stablecoins and the stocks and the bonds and the derivatives are being settled to Ethereum. And then the other 10% are split between, you know, 100 other blockchains. And it just reminds me of 90% of search happens on Google and 1% happens on Bing and 1% happens on Ask Jeeves and 1% happens on Yahoo.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  And so we're already seeing the fact that liquidity begets liquidity. And Ethereum has this kind of critical lead in being this place where we're seeing most of this commerce settle. And furthermore, the tailwinds that you touched on, Brian, are that we've just seen the Genius Act pass, which gave us clarity around stablecoins. Everyone saw the positive tailwinds to CRCL, Circle. And what we can say about that is the largest beneficiary of Genius was Ethereum,

• 24:50Speaker 00

  because the majority of the settlecoins, the stablecoins, settle on Ethereum. In about two months, we're going to have the Clarity Act, which is Market Structure Bill, which is kind of the tokenization of stocks, bonds, derivatives. The largest beneficiary of Clarity is going to be Ethereum again, because the majority of these high-quality liquid assets are settling on Ethereum. So it's the best substrate and maybe why that's happening? I would say there are a few reasons why Ethereum has this lead. One, it has what's called client diversity.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  There are nine implementations of Ethereum that form consensus every six seconds, every time there's a block created. To give you an idea of other blockchains, Solana has one implementation. Bitcoin has one implementation. So there's nine implementations of Ethereum, which is important that if you want to have this global settlement layer for all of Earth's assets that nation-states, or corporations, or people can trustlessly interact through, Ethereum really is the only one that has the ability to have this never ceasing uptime due to that client diversity.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  And I think that that's extremely important. Another reason is the notion of standards. And kind of if you're a technological historian, Java became J2EE, Java 2 Enterprise Edition, back in the 90s, and that became the most used software language because there were clean web APIs, that there was a standard, whether you were in Mumbai, Paris, London, San Francisco, there was a standard to use, and there were clean database APIs. And what we're seeing now is we're able, Ethereum has done a great job of creating certain standards, token standards.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  So something like the ERC 20 token standard for fungible tokens, or the ERC 725 was an example of one for NFTs. But basically, anyone was able to have this standard token and a standard wallet, and was able to put the token in the wallet, you know, simply put. And so millions of developers could basically coalesce around these standards and build applications that used the same basic ingredients, and that's permeated really well.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Okay. Now, the critics would say that a lot of this activity of the stable coins and the Ethereum chain is happening on these Layer 2s like Base and Arbitrum, and they only get settled infrequently onto Ethereum, and the total net fees to Ethereum is like six figures, it's very small. What would you say to that? Some called it a ghost chain six months ago, and said there's just nothing going on there but the rent. Maybe that was a little bit harsh. What do you say to that?

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think that this is an architecture that is created purposefully. And, and, and, and, and simply put, to kind of zoom out for your listeners. If I were to take Brian to the pub and open the bar tab with, with, with a server and hand him or her my credit card and buy us a round of appetizers, a round of drinks, a round of entrees, a round of desserts, pay a tip and close the tab. All of these microtransactions that started from zero and ended at $500 or 500 pounds, those can be batched.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  And, and then basically, the, the opening and the closing and the batching of all these transactions can get settled to layer one. And, and, and basically, this architecture creates the ability for any application in the world, any company in the world, to customize how they want their layer two, their, their environment to work. Some may be, be, be optimizing for speed. Some may be optimizing for privacy. Some may be optimizing for 10 people to work together in it. And that's how websites work on the internet, right?

• 29:21Speaker 00

  I mean, everyone uses HTTP, but amazon.com, google.com. And, and so basically, it's, it's reminiscent of how the internet works. Where everyone uses HTTP, everyone settles to Ethereum. But there's thousands, millions of different websites. And what we've seen is that Ethereum has optimized for keeping transactions very cost efficient at that layer one settlement.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  And, and, and basically, it has become the standard choice for companies to create these layer two architectures. So we've seen kind of the fast movers. And I think that we're early in this transition period, but Coinbase has created base, as you referenced. That's their layer two. Robinhood just created their tokenized version of stocks that settle to Ethereum layer one. Kraken has created Inc., which is a layer two scaling solution, and on and on and on. And now that we have some of these regulatory tailwinds, we're going to see, I think, all of the major financial

• 30:38Speaker 00

  institutions are going to be kind of following suit. And if we were to kind of use the analogy of ride shares, you know, companies like Uber and Lyft, five years ago, it would cost $50 to go from lower Manhattan to upper Manhattan. For the same ride share now, it costs $150. The technology hasn't necessarily changed, but Uber has become ubiquitous. And what we can do is basically have Ethereum as the standard for settlement solutions and settlement layers. And there are ways to basically increase the pricing as it

• 31:20Speaker 00

  becomes more congested. So there are two burning mechanisms within Ethereum. One's called EIP, Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559, which burned every layer one transaction. So it basically is kind of like a stock buyback, if you will, where basically shares are retired, if you're talking to kind of like the traditional financial equities investors. And then there's EIP 4844, which burns Ether for every layer two settlement solution. So basically, there are two ways already that this transaction occurrence can basically

• 32:04Speaker 00

  reduce the supply of Ether, that can have a positive price occurrence towards the Ethereum network. And there are ways to basically increase the burn per transaction that I believe the foundation will prioritize as Ethereum continues to cement itself as this global settlement layer of humanity.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  And I've heard a few people in the space saying that Ethereum is the chosen network because it never had the downtime, it's got the history, and even though Solana might be faster, and maybe it's got maybe some other things, some say it's not as decentralized, it's obviously been downtime, that Ethereum now has been chosen. First of all, is that true in your mind, from everyone that you're talking to in the institutions? And then I actually want to talk a little bit about, you know, your main competitors.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Sir, so, so I think that there is no debate, and there is empirical data that shows high-quality liquid assets, which is what I think is important. If you're talking about a global settlement layer, like, I don't care much about meme coins, or swords of a video game, or, you know, what I think that I'm interested in, and I think what Ethereum serves for, is a global settlement layer to the economy of the world. And, right now, it's still very early days, but Ethereum has basically 90% market share as that settlement

• 33:42Speaker 00

  layer. And I think so, so there's no debate there.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Okay, let's talk about the competition, because it's very unique, and I'm curious how you feel about competition, and if you think more is coming. We've got Bitmine Immersion, which is the getting more famous every day, Tom Lee, who has been an analyst for a long time, was bullish on Ethereum for a long time, saw him on CNBC, bullish on stocks, bullish on crypto, and then all of a sudden he's the chairman of Bitmine Immersion. They have, I think, about $5 billion of ETH, about 1.5%, I think he's going for 5%. That's been the one that's been talked about, and I guess that's liquid. There's Sharplink, which is Joe Lubin of ConsenSys in the past, who I think has about 3.3 billion of ETH. And then there's you. One of the big things about you, Andrew, is I think you put in about

• 34:34Speaker 01

  650 million of your own supply of ETH, which gives you a ton of cred of the Then there's the Zilla and I think it kind of drops off from there. Have I got that about right? And how do you look at those competitors? Are they different? Do they help you ultimately?

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, so great question. You know, first and foremost, I have a ton of respect for Tom and Joe in what they're doing. And I think you did point out something right in the sense that I've put more skin in the game materially more than anybody in all treasury space. And that brings me to kind of a bit of a differentiation. Broadly speaking, Bitminer and Sbet are reverse takeovers of shell companies. And what we've done is we've done a de novo entity.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  And I'll just be kind of broadly speaking about this. So I wanted to contribute some of my own capital because I didn't want to recommend something to anybody else that I wouldn't do myself. And I thought that was important to me to basically lead by example. And say that this is something that I am patient zero. I am a shareholder as well. And everyone was investing parapassu with me. And when I looked broadly speaking at the two paths, or let's call it three paths. One is to do an IPO. And I didn't think that that made sense. You know, it would take a year plus to, you know,

• 36:18Speaker 00

  create an S1 and go through like the full capital markets process. So then there were kind of two paths. One was to do a reverse takeover. Or the other was to do a SPAC. And I had a few conversations with some reverse takeover targets. And so basically broadly speaking, anybody who wants to sell me their publicly traded business on the NASDAQ is doing that because their business is failing.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  And within a failing business, there are lots of contingent liabilities.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  I'll give you a few examples. One was was a biotech company where the drug didn't make it through clinical trials. And and basically it was going out of business. And and due to how the SEC works, you can't have just a rapid removal of a CEO. Because there are what are called change of control provisions. So basically, I would have if I went down the path of this particular reverse takeover. I would have had to pay a CEO who wanted $5 million a year to stay on the board. You know, his company is bankrupt, basically. And the guy didn't know how to spell Ethereum. And I didn't want that ongoing liability.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  Another, you know, there are Bitcoin mining firms that are, you know, another example was one that was in a 10 year data center lease. And they were paying $10 million a year, you know, where they were where they were hosting all their their data, their their mining hardware. And and now I don't need any of that because I'm in Ethereum staking facility. That doesn't need the hardware, the electricity or the real estate. But they're in year four, they've got six more years of $10 million payments. I didn't want to incur those costs. You know, furthermore, there are companies that are now reserving

• 38:27Speaker 00

  part of the assets of the treasuries for lawsuits. That, you know, if one of these these companies, you know, they have a four year statute of limitations. Sure, maybe now they're going in the direction of having a digital asset treasury. But they can get sued for previous, you know, the the the previous four years of whatever that operating business was. So I essentially didn't want pre existing operating businesses, pre existing cap tables, pre existing liabilities, pre existing potential lawsuits. Because

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Something, you know, a company may not be sued if their market cap is less than $10 million, but if they have $1 billion, $3 billion of an asset, that becomes a honeypot now. And you have to kind of think through what are you inheriting? So basically, you know, first and foremost, I would say I wanted something clean. And I wanted, so basically what we've done is we have a pure play de novo brand new entity that is anchored with Ether that is merging with a special purpose acquisition company and creating this new operating business that doesn't have any of that pre-existing skeletons in our closet, if you will.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  And for me, with my assets, that was the only way I could get comfortable with this, with this model. And to devil's advocate that, what I'm going through right now is what's called the S4 registration process. So an S1 is if you do an IPO and S4 is if you're doing a merger.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Peter Thiel took a half a million dollars and turned it into a billion dollars using the exact same techniques we're using inside the investment public. He met a CEO, his name was Zuckerberg. He pitched him the deal and he said, okay, I'll give you a half a million dollars. Mark went public and sold the shares to people like you. Well, what happened to Peter? Well, he exited and got a 2,300 extra turn. The wealthy invest in early-stage companies, folks. The public markets are for suckers. It's a rigged game. By the way, this happens in crypto as well. It's called pre-sale tokens. This is Solana. Does anybody know this chain? They sold pre-sale tokens for four cents and you can see the date on there, April 5th, 2018. Look at Solana today, folks. That thing's up over 1,000 X.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  The media and Wall Street and all these hype people get you to buy the top. Meanwhile, they put their clients in at the bottom and they use you for liquidity to make their clients rich. You can play this same game. You just have to have the financial education and the deal flow. That's it.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  And we're doing a merger between our LLC, the de novo LLC where the anchor Ether is and the special purpose acquisition company that doesn't have a pre-existing operating business. And, you know, I would say our one differentiation there is that we're not, let's call it a, while we have stock that, that there is publicly tradable ETHM stock that people are able to acquire. We're not fully merged just yet. And basically, there's about a 60, 90 day window.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  And then at that point, we, we are able to start to use, let's call it all of the traditional capital markets tools and, and, and to trade similar to these shell companies. And I think that, uh, to devil's advocate that, you know, for example, in, in those 60 days, uh, Tom Lee has been able to go out and acquire a gigantic amount of ether. And, uh, I was not comfortable with the risks of the pre-existing liabilities that I just said, um, for potentially the reward of being able to acquire that amount of ether. We've been able to, uh, raise a considerable amount of capital, you know, over two and a half billion dollars privately.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Because of the fact that when I talk to institutional investors and they go to their investment committee, they say, well, if we want pre, uh, you know, pure play exposure to Ethereum. But we've got to deal with this pre-existing CEO and they're, they may get sued, uh, you know, th- these guys are saying, you know, we get laughed out of our investment committees rooms. If, if, if we kind of tried to propose some of these, these ways. So I think that time will tell. But with that said, we've, we've, we've tried to create, uh, an institutional vehicle. A, a lot of these shells, you know, broadly speaking, have investment banks I've never heard of before, law firms I've never heard of before.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  And, and, and auditors that I've never heard of before. And we've come to market with Citi.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  You know, is the only one that has kind of a bold bracket investment bank. This went to the top of the the the house. Jane Fraser signed off on this. They're not doing any other treasuries because they they they do understand kind of the nuance of having a pristine structure. KPMG is our auditor. Aside from MicroStrategy, will be the first treasury to go through a big four audit. Scadden, you know, Amla 10 is our law firm, which is one of the largest, most accredited law firms in the world. And and what I think is important here is that I believe that because we have this pristine entity,

• 44:01Speaker 00

  cleanest credit rating from from a perspective of having a big four auditor and and no, none of those pre-existing liabilities. I believe that we'll benefit from the best priced and and and probably first to market convertible bond issuances and or preferred share issuances. So so to understand that, basically, the the these preferred shares or or convertible bonds are are are credit or debt instruments. And and basically, the counterparty to that is buying paper, right? And and when you're buying paper, you have to price in these types of risks,

• 44:44Speaker 00

  these opaque risks, like, you know, i- i- is there? Is there some skeleton in the closet that could cause the stock to go down 20%? That's, you know, separate from the net asset value of the underlying digital asset. I think that's important. And so what I what I hope is that, and and I expect, is that we're going to be rewarded in the medium to long term at the expense of kind of the shorter term strategy of getting out the door because we came to market. Thinking about what is the institutional chassis that's necessary for what we think drove

• 45:27Speaker 00

  MicroStrategy from single billion dollars. They didn't do it from ATM equity issuances. They did it from the issuances of convertible bonds and preferred shares. And basically, I believe we'll be the best situated for those more sophisticated financial instruments to be able to do a balanced approach with lots of different financial instruments with an asset that is double the volatility and yield generating than Bitcoin.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  That makes a lot of sense. And if you ever watch Michael talk about, you know, when he's issuing convertible bonds and he's got that big smile on his face. He's like, you know, we just issued debt. We pay a 0% coupon. We raised a billion and a half dollars and I can go and buy, spend all of that on Bitcoin and basically just, you know, he's like, I get free money is because he does such an efficient way of selling that vol. Obviously, the market is really comfortable issuing that and paying a low coupon because I guess they're very comfortable with those risks. And I guess you want to become kind of that gold standard for Ethereum.

• 46:32Speaker 00

  Agreed.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And again, if anybody wants to go deeper on that, you can kind of go figure out what Michael's doing there. As I talked to Michael over the years, he ended up calling himself a Bitcoin refinery. And that's a really interesting way of looking at it. And I don't know, maybe you're going to be an Ethereum refinery, but.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Or a machine, right?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Talk about that word. You could have called this in it. You could have called it a Zilla, but you called it the machine. Why?

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, you know, Godzilla kind of consumes things where we're, our goal is to generate Ether, right? We are, our goal is to have, if you know, if one has a thousand of our shares and that equals, for our round numbers, one Ether, our goal through staking, restaking DeFi and the issuance of financial instruments like convertible bonds or preferred shares is to make that one. Ether per thousand shares, eventually grow to two ether per thousand shares. And to do that systematically with the least amount of risk. And, and, and so we have a full risk management team.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Our head of staking built the initial consensus staking machine. Then recreated that at Dharma, all that know-how comes now here to the ether machine. And, and basically, the whole concept is to employ the full productivity of this asset.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Andrew, do you ever get nervous that you're putting $650 million of ETH into some vehicle that you'll have less control over than you used to have?

• 48:08Speaker 00

  I understand that risk. I do think that through this vehicle, I will be able to grow my ether concentration more efficiently than I would previously.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. And that so, and now my other question is, it's not live yet on the NASDAQ. And of course, people can't buy it. But is that necessarily slowing you down because you can still raise capital? And what are the dates expected on that?

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so our merger hasn't been affected yet. Stock is selling on the NASDAQ. The, the, the, the special purpose acquisition company dynamics has stock that's available for buying and selling day in, day out under ETHM right now. And we are going through the S4 registration process. And we have, we, we, we assume that this will occur in Q4. And, and I can't give extremely clear guidance on that because to a certain extent, it's a back and forth with the SEC.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  And, and basically, we are at the mercy of that process with them.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Okay. And I heard you quote when you were speaking with someone else, you said, "Give us four quarters for Wall Street." And it was, I think, a way of saying that this is obviously a long-term process for you, but you believe that when you start showing these quarterly results and show Wall Street exactly what you're doing and how this is going to work, that, and they start covering this asset and covering what you're doing, that they're going to get very, very comfortable with the way you've done it and what you're doing to where this is just going to become a normal asset that they buy.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  Agreed. Agreed. So I think that one has to get comfortable with, let's just call it the digital asset universe. And I think that the regulatory tailwinds have enabled a lot of that comfort. And now institutional investors are able to deploy capital in, let's call it stocks. No one's opening a, you know, a retail digital asset exchange account. People are expressing their views in, you know, maybe ETFs, maybe things like MSTR for Bitcoin via ETHM for, you know, Ether as an example. And part of our role in this ecosystem is to explain,

• 50:52Speaker 00

  and part of what I enjoy doing, and you know, we're doing it right now, you know, bottoms up to Main Street, top down to Wall Street, you know, what is Ethereum? You know, explaining, you know, the volatility to the volatility-seeking stakeholders, explaining yield to the yield-seeking stakeholders, explaining what the TAM is of the next generation of the internet. You know, what differentiates this substrate versus other smart contract platforms? You know, differentiating why Bitcoin can't do this, and Bitcoin has one use case and one asset. You know, I can send you a Bitcoin,

• 51:37Speaker 00

  but we can't programmatically, you know, create a digital token that represents a stock, bond, or... Derivatives like we can on Ethereum. And then, you know, furthermore, that's kind of like, let's call it the 1.0. The 2.0 is, you know, what are the financial modeling considerations? Do we, do we aspire a discounted cash flow to this? Do we aspire a TAM based upon the assets we can tokenize? Do we accrue value to the notion of enabling trust? You know, understanding that, then understanding kind of the yield consideration. You came from a fixed income world. Like this is a first of its kind, you know, $40 billion traded yesterday of Ether.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  And it's also generating yield. So if you like Bitcoin, you'll probably like double the volatility Bitcoin, plus the fact that it can generate yield. And we can kind of create the models off of that. And then kind of just explaining the use cases, you know, what is this? You know, what does this enable? You know, like, like, like breaking down stable coins. And, you know, and as an example, you know, we give a price discovery. Like broadly speaking, Ethereum gives the price discovery mechanism for the value of intermediation in any transaction. And to use kind of the, the, the first product market fit of stable coins. We're starting to see the early days where if you were to buy something on the internet,

• 53:06Speaker 00

  you could, you know, purchase with Google Pay, purchase with Apple Pay. And now you're starting to see that button, you know, purchase with stable coins. And, and basically I've seen multiple websites that say, you know, if, if, if your good costs $103, because you're purchasing it with American Express or Apple Pay, it costs $100 if you buy it with a stable coin. And right then and there, you just gave the price discovery mechanism for payment providers.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  And as the intermediary. And so with that said, we're starting to see, you know, the propensity of what this technology can do. And that's like one singular use case.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, it's interesting because you hear the analogy, digital gold versus digital oil. You got famous by saying, I'd rather have an iPhone instead of a landline. And that was you comparing, I think Ethereum to Bitcoin. I've had lots of Maxies on my show here over the years. I think I first had Max Kaiser here in 2013, who won't talk to me anymore because I talk about other things than Bitcoin. And there, in this pure play, there's only one asset and that's our asset. Obviously, you saw a bunch of interest go into yield on Bitcoin a couple of years ago. And honestly, it really hasn't gone anywhere. And I don't know if it ever will, to be honest, Andrew. Do you think it's only a matter of time before people see these as two completely different things?

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Or will there still be a bunch of people that will always swear by Bitcoin?

• 54:39Speaker 00

  There's going to be religious wars. They've been happening since the beginning of time. And this is just, you know, this technological flavor of religious war, right? And I think people will have their

• 54:54Speaker 00

  idealisms. That all said, Bitcoin will always have one use case and one asset. Technologically, can't have other assets and other use cases on it due to the virtual machine. So the UTXO virtual machine is specifically created for simplicity. And that's fine. And but Ethereum is specifically created to generate any type of asset with any type of arbitrarily complex logic in it. And I think that

• 55:34Speaker 00

  Time will tell, but I think the TAM of the internet and the TAM of basically digitally representing any asset versus the TAM of this specific asset that that's given kind of the moniker of digital gold as a way to explain it, but you know, it's not digitizing gold and it's got a, you know, a specific, you know, let's call it supply chain or or or or supply release process. And we're starting to see rational actors in the space that are securing the Bitcoin network migrating their hardware to language learning model inferences,

• 56:18Speaker 00

  you know, for example, Galaxy and and Mike Novogratz has been kind of one of the largest Bitcoin bulls there are, you know, over the last decade, has moved his hardware from a GPU mining to a core weave data center for LLM inferences. And I I think that there's going to be enough of, I would say, brain power to continually secure Bitcoin. But those types of occurrences, you know, these are rational actors that don't necessarily care as much about Bitcoin. I mean, I think there are some miners that that do care, but I think mostly, generally speaking, these are self-interested rational actors

• 57:00Speaker 00

  that if they can earn a dollar a day or $2 a day, they'll they'd rather do $2 a day. So so I think that, you know, it's time will tell.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Andrew, if you're successful, what does Ether Machine look like a year from now, two years from now, and also in comparison to the other two competitors? Do you have more ETH than Tom? Is that a win? Or what what is a win for you?

• 57:25Speaker 00

  So so so what I think is a win is is actually, we are the most efficient in two things. One is Ethereum generation per share, meaning that we have the ability to generate as much Ether as possible incrementally per share, and that's being done through staking, restaking, and DeFi, and the ability to issue financial instruments like preferred shares and converts. And we also do that with a lean, mean team,

• 58:08Speaker 00

  and we're not doing things like outsourcing the asset management for additional fees, which others may be doing. So that's kind of the first consideration, is being the best at generating Ether per share. Secondarily, I think a function of that will be accruing more Ether. And I don't necessarily, I think there is like a value to number one in terms of, there's a lot of headlines around person number one, and we aspire to be number one. I also think there's Pepsi and Coke, there's Amazon, Google,

• 58:52Speaker 00

  and Microsoft Azure for clouds, and I think that there are going to be a handful of winners. And I think that we're maniacally focused on generating Ether concentration per share at the most minimal risk for our shareholders.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Is there a point where one company can own too much Ether? Like 10%, 20%? Does that get a little bit?

• 59:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that mathematically, that'll be very difficult because of just, there are already enough players in the space that are acquiring. I do think that you're gonna have kind of, there's three of us that are multi-billion dollar managers that will benefit from the economies of scale. And I think we'll have slightly differentiating and co-optician, if you will, approaches. And we'll optimize for slightly different things. But I think that, you know, there are a few of these that kind of went out with these kind of lower effort shells, and I think that they're gonna have a very difficult time of raising additional incremental capital.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  And those may be rollups, but I do think we have to juxtapose.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  What the London Real Investment Club actually does for you, it gives you the keys to open that door to the inside. Deals, in the last three weeks, I've participated in three incredible deals, a layer two Bitcoin protocol, an incredible AI protocol. The deal flow is beyond what I expected. I don't think I've ever seen a model like this that just gives average folks the opportunity to be behind the deals, and that's exactly what we've done. Not only that, you get to hang out with Brian Rose every week. And for me, that was huge because I look at Brian as somebody who's not only an expert in the space, and I think is on the leading edge, but just the leading edge of thought with London Real and the work he's doing there. To anyone who's taking a serious look at this, I know it's a big decision.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  It was a big decision for me and my family, and it is one of the best decisions I've ever made. So I wish you all the best and hope you come join us.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  The centralization vector, which I don't think anyone's going to get to, I don't think crossing even 10% becomes a centralization vector. And I don't think anyone's going to get there. MicroStrategy, for example, is at 3%. And just the increase in price from three months ago where Ether was at 2,500 and now is at 4,500, that makes it all the more difficult to increase that percentage. But I'd say that with that said, we are also benefiting by explaining this to the world.

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  And I think that there is a trade off worth having, that as long as we don't get too concentrated, but we do have the ability to use the microphone to explain this to Main Street, whether it's on CNBC and Wall Street, whether it's sell side research to that Citibank creates about our stock, those are wins, right? And the sooner people are educated and the sooner people go through that process and cross the chasm on what are the use cases, start to use things like stable coins, start to use things like decentralized applications as they continue to mature, the better we're all off.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  Now Andrew, we can already see the chirping on Twitter and people are saying that when the bear market comes, and you've been in this business for over 10 years, you know, and so you know it's gonna come, that people are saying the treasury companies are gonna exacerbate that bear market. And they're gonna be the FTXs, or the Three Arrows Capital, or the Terra Luna, that are gonna make the crash, crash harder, as all these companies are forced to liquidate. How do you comment?

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  So, so I think that there's two points there. So, one, perpetuals or preferreds do not have, let's call it, a margin call ability. So, so, so one needs to understand that, but, you know, they do have, let's call it, a coupon ability. So, so, in, in, let's call it the MSTR example, he can never be margin called on his preferreds, or they can never be margin called on their preferreds, but he does have to, let's call it, pay his coupon. You know, and, you know, he has four different types of preferred shares, you know, one has a 10% interest rate. It's hard to, let's call it, generate 10% yield on an asset that generates no yield, right? So, that, that's

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  a consideration. The converts, I think you have to prudently risk manage, and you have to understand kind of the troughs and the peaks. And, you know, we, we as a society have gotten very comfortable, you know, going out and borrowing 80% of a house and putting 20% down, but, but with this, I think that there are, the, the ability to maybe take 10% or 20% of, of, of debt to acquire an asset and then generate yield on it is, is, is a slightly nuanced...

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  I would say consideration and I think that it all goes down to details and like proper risk management and having adults in the room and I don't think that you want to overly leverage in this situation but you know we have our principles and our risk management and these are the types of considerations that we have looking at the troughs looking at the floor making these models on what's comfortable in terms of a risk matrix and I think you know understanding that capital stack ATM issuance staking yield generation convertible bonds that have let's call it a timeline duration versus a preferred shared that doesn't have a timeline duration

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  they're kind of perpetual but they have coupons and and kind of maxing for those the those matrices of outcomes.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Okay, so maybe you guys were going to be doing that but not everyone's going to manage their risk maybe as well as you. I think the NASDAQ just also came out with maybe some guidelines or some questions they're going to start asking about treasury companies whereas in the past they seem to be.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  And I think they're great and like this is kind of like another differentiation and what I would say kind of more of the tail risk for me like I'm trying to do everything by the by the book and I'm trying to do it right by myself you know let's call it as a self-interested rational actor someone who put my mom into this product and and and and doing this as a fiduciary for shareholders where I purposely went down the path of getting a clean entity where I felt comfortable putting my own assets into I purposely went down the path of paying for the more expensive legal team getting the right underwriter in a bolt bracket bank versus

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  someone I've never heard of paying for a big four auditor to create the institutional vehicle properly at the expensive speed and and you know not going to lie it's harder you know we've done a great job and we're proud of the two and a half billion dollars of committed capital but it's not the seven billion dollars that that that you know BMNR has raised today but we think that we're we're building this tank for the medium and long term which is important to us and similarly I think that this is already getting kind of a bucketed industry where someone who's put

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  a lot of effort into creating the proper structure is getting kind of bucketed with, you know, a lower level, lower effort endeavor. And we're starting to see, and I kind of broadly call it, you know, if you play silly games, you win silly prizes. And, and, you know, there, there are some examples where I'm talking about the second largest market capped asset that we have a singular focus in. If you go down to coin market cap number 200 asset, we're hearing an oh, and PS, that's a locked token that, that, that doesn't unlock for a year or two from now.

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  That's getting put into a treasury and being sold at one to one to retail. And, and I think, you know, any other time, if, if you were to buy that token thinking that it would appreciate, and you had the time horizon and I wanted the liquidity, any self-interested rational actor would say, okay, I'll assume that risk, but for that risk, I pay a discount. And, you know, that discount's for debate. Is it a 10% discount? Is it a 50% discount? But I'm, I'm sure you, it's not one to one. And, and, and we're starting to see, and, and I think that the, the market's actually maturing and getting smarter on this. And a bunch of these things like tried to get

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  out to market and, and, and people started to kind of raise the alarms on it. And I think that that's kind of more of, of, of the risk that I'm seeing, rather than kind of the leverage, because I think that anyone who's put the time and the effort into creating these structures, and these, this is, this is a, this is a labor intensive process, running a SEC registered public equity. It, it make no bones about it. This is, this is a, this is a hard endeavor.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  What, what, what I worry about more than the leverage, because I think that can be very prudently risk managed. I, I, I am more concerned about lower level efforts going out there and, and, and kind of selling these.

• 1:09:15Speaker 00

  Less credible tokens on less credible terms and retail not necessarily understanding what they're acquiring.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Right, we've seen the explosion of that. I think it was yesterday, the day before, WorldCoin, I think, raised 2.5 billion for a buyback treasury. Obviously, the Trump family, World Liberty Financial, did their All 5 Sigma entity, I think, last week. A deal we're involved in called Story Protocol, announced one recently as well. I mean, that's it's smaller. I think it's number 40 as far as the rank of total market cap. So yeah, we're seeing a lot of treasury companies. Obviously, you made a comment that retail should be careful to know exactly what they're getting, but it looks like this is the trend de jour and it's going to keep going and going and going. Does it, does it just make you nervous the smaller the market cap of the coin and then the less clear the terms,

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  the less clean the entity? Is that just something everyone should just be super aware of?

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think I've kind of beat the dead horse on, on, on, let's call it the entities. I think a lot of people discuss, like, let's call it the tokenomic side of the house and don't have understanding of the, the notion of the shell companies versus having a clean entity that we've, we've discussed. And then furthermore, I think that the illiquid coin market cap number 50 doesn't benefit from the liquid capital markets of, of the, of, of the US stock exchange because it can't handle it. You know, like,

• 1:10:55Speaker 00

  what's the bid ask spread there? And, and so I think that that's, you know, a consideration.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Is it, is it somewhat strange to see that, you know, after going all into these tokens and crypto, that we're coming all the way back to the New York Stock Exchange to get liquidity? I mean, you've been doing this for 10, 11 years since the inception of Ethereum. You've watched this whole thing progress. Is it kind of strange to see it in a weird way coming full circle where the liquidity we always hoped for would be on the blockchain is actually down in these what look like old school exchanges?

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think I think there's there's a nuanced response to that. I think that they're they are a necessary evil and we're not seeing getting the because basically a lot of the institutional investors just can't play on public permissionless blockchains yet. And I think that we're in a, you know, 10 year, 20 year transformation and we've got to meet people and companies and corporates where they are. And and I think that this makes sense for an asset like Ethereum. I don't think it makes sense for some application layer token that's, you know, number 200 on coin market cap.

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  Uh, you know, by design. So I think that there's kind of nuance in that conversation.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  Andrew, what it's like for you, because um, I was reading a press release from 2015 that I think you were included in that was like a deal you cut. I think with Microsoft back in the day for consensus and I had John Lilick on here a couple of weeks ago and he says you were a madman with biz dev. Back in the day, I mean, that's 10 years ago where you were working on this Ethereum blockchain and then fast forward to a year or two ago. Where, you know, you could you could be canceled and de-banked for being in crypto to where now the president of the United States has a meme coin. Uh, oh, DeFi protocol, his son just became a billionaire with a Bitcoin miner.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  I mean, what what can you tell us about that whole journey you've been on and yet you still seem very excited about this and I don't see any gray hair. So how do you do that?

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  Well, there's definitely been some gray hair. I I don't think I have physical gray hair, but know that I have spiritual gray hair.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  Uh, and it has been a journey. I think that uh, what I'd say broadly speaking is I am still excited today as I was, you know, a decade ago. Uh, I think that my I was maybe naive in the sense that I thought I could decentralize all the things a decade ago. And and and and innovation takes time and and and furthermore.

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  There is an incumbency that is hard to unseat. And it's hard to assert and centralized powers don't want to give them up. And I think that broadly speaking, we are trending in the right direction. And we now have kind of, I would say, over the last four years, there has been a tremendous amount of work that was stymied by political issues. And without getting political, I think that lots of actors in this space are trying

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  to do the right thing, trying to self-regulate, trying to be in a divs. And I think that every year, the wheat gets separated from the shaft. And if you look at dot coms, eighty-six percent of them went to zero. And I'd argue the other fourteen percent changed the way the world worked. And I think we've got to have that, you know, continuous optimism, but realism that, you know, eighty-five percent of probably what we do will go to zero. And that's how hard it is to build a business or to build a unicorn or build, you know, the next generation of how society agrees or disagrees with each other.

• 1:14:59Speaker 00

  And I think that in the end, what I'm doing is going to be one pillar, you know, one of multiple pillars that can, A, give public market investors exposure to the asset class, unlike how they would on their own safely, but also be a microphone to explain how Ethereum works to society.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  You know, I think we're all familiar with this concept of the innovator's dilemma. And you know, that resistance to innovation from the incumbent. You know, but when I look at the banking industry, Andrew, like I can't really, it's such, there's so many pieces and so many different interests. It's like on one hand, like you said, I'm seeing a payment where I can pay three bucks less with a stablecoin than using a credit or a debit card. You'd think no bank would want that. A bank that has a SWIFT system, you'd think no bank would want instant settlement on a stablecoin. And yet, at the same time, they also seem to be embracing certain aspects. BlackRock pushes the ETF. BlackRock's building the tokenized Bittle system. And so, it's really hard to understand what's resisting.

• 1:16:15Speaker 00

  All the investment bankers, I mean, made a killing on the Circle IPO. And they'll make a killing, and they made a killing on the Coinbase IPO.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  And I mean, it's just. And the treasury companies.

• 1:16:25Speaker 00

  And the treasury companies. And all the lawyers did great on that. And you know, I mean, like, you know, it's, you know, there's a great quote, I think it was Edison. It's something like, "In terms of principles, stand like a rock. In terms of style, you know, be fluid." And I think that, you know, we have to be able to embrace change, but have the right principles on how we conduct ourselves.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  It's such an exciting time. I, look, we went heavy into this four years ago. And I just, the change in the last 12 months, it's hard just to explain to people. I mean, I took a snapshot of the Wall Street Journal Digital Edition a month ago, and there were four articles on crypto on that front page. And a year before that, you'd probably get none, you know, for a month, maybe. And then the headlines coming out of the White House and like all these things, it's just kind of mind boggling, you know, that we're here right now. And it's an exciting time. And then I think back to that press release I read of you 10 years ago, and then you realize innovation just definitely takes time.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  Andrew, how can people learn more about what you're doing with the machine and then, you know, potentially participate in the future and all of that?

• 1:17:44Speaker 00

  Sir, sir.

• 1:17:47Speaker 00

  www.ethermachine.com

• 1:17:52Speaker 00

  The stock is ETHM on the NASDAQ And you can find me on Twitter aka ethermachine.com

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  And for us Brits over here and maybe people in the Middle East and other places Is it a potential that we might be able to buy some of this on our own exchanges in the future?

• 1:18:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely, like through an ADR. It's NASDAQ, so it's globally accessible for sure.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  Okay, fantastic. Thank you so much for the time, Andrew. Like you said, I think the clear delineator here Is you putting all of this skin in the game and putting your huge chunk of assets in there. And now it kind of goes to show that because you have so much skin in the game, you're being extra careful on that legal entity. And I think time will tell that when you start issuing all of these exciting capital structure pieces, I think that's really, that hard work is going to pay off. So, really exciting to watch. Thank you for everything you've done with Ethereum and consensus over the years and now. And it looks like we're in exciting times, so appreciate you.

• 1:18:56Speaker 00

  Thank you, Brian.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  All right, fantastic. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you next time on London Real. Bye.

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