#1352 Bill Barhydt | $50 Trillion Is Coming To Bitcoin & Crypto

Bill Barhydt is the Co-Founder & CEO of Abra, a new type of digital cash payments app and network enabling the transfer of cash between any two smartphones. In this conversation, we talk about the brand new regulatory approval as a registered investment advisor, what that means for Abra, how they can service both credited & uncredited investors now, why allowing basic financial services has been so difficult, and where the industry is going. ======================= Buy and sell cryptocurrency in a tax-advantaged crypto IRA with iTrustCapital. Enjoy 24/7 access, lowest fees in the industry, and tax benefits for your retirement. Open an account today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.itrustcapital.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ) is one of the largest public Bitcoin miners and hosting solutions providers for Bitcoin mining in North America. To learn more about Core Scientific, please visit: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.corescientific.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Bill Barhite. He is the founder and CEO of Abra. In this conversation, we talk about the brand new regulatory approval as a registered investment advisor, what that means for Abra, how they can go ahead and service both accredited and unaccredited

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  investors now, and why allowing things like trading, earning, yield, borrowing, and many other basic financial services has been so hard previously, and why now you're going to be able to do it in an RIA structure that leverages separately managed accounts. This conversation is fascinating because it reveals where the industry is going and how companies are learning to work with regulators. And so I think that you're going to learn a ton from it. Here is my conversation with Bill Barhite.

• 1:16Speaker 01

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

• 1:40Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:21Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Core Scientific. They are one of the largest public Bitcoin mining companies and hosting solutions in North America. They specialize in transforming energy into high-value compute with exceptional efficiency at scale and recently announced a contract with CoreWeave, a leader in AI cloud compute, to provide up to 16 megawatts of data center capacity. With a substantial fleet of their own miners, Core Scientific not only earns Bitcoin for their own account, but also provides hosting services for large-scale Bitcoin mining customers operating out of seven data centers in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Texas. You can learn more about Core Scientific by visiting corescientific.com. That's corescientific.com. Go check them out today.

• 3:47Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Bill here. Bill, it feels like during the entire crypto winter, there was massive scrutiny. There was tons of problems with companies that offered trading of cryptocurrencies, yield on cryptocurrencies, borrowing, earning, etc. You all were one of those companies. It felt like every regulatory body was scrutinizing this business model in these companies. But you've come out the other side and you have kind of a new twist and some regulatory approvals that I think a lot of people are wondering, what are you doing and how did you get this done? And so, maybe you can just walk us through like what happened during that bear market? And then, how did you guys get to the other side of this with this new regulatory approval?

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Sure, so there were, there were really three aspects to what I'll call the lending yield space, right? There was staking itself, which is basically just earning yield via staking Ethereum, or staking Solana, or any other stakeable proof of stake assets. Then there's the yield via lending, which is, could either be direct lending, collateralized, you know, borrowing dollars, collateralized in Bitcoin. And then there's DeFi-based yield. So that's, that's kind of the yield is part two. And then third is borrowing against your own assets, right? So that's just, that's just literally lending out. And so we'll come back to the lending in a bit, but on the staking and borrowing slash yield side, right, the states in particular came down,

• 5:07Speaker 02

  certain states came down very hard on players in the space that these were security offerings. Now, for most companies in the space, it didn't matter because they died, right? Celsius, Voyager, BlockFi, you know, et cetera, et cetera, they're gone. So there's nothing to fight other than who gets the money back, right? And they're basically, and that's a function of the fact that these were all pooled assets in a, in a bank-like structure where when you pool the assets, you became a liability on the company's balance sheet, meaning your Bitcoin that you're earning yield on became a balance, a liability on Celsius's balance sheet, right? So, so that was a major problem in and of itself, independent of the fact that they thought that staking in many states like California and others was a security offering. Okay?

• 5:50Speaker 02

  So that all basically got shut down in, via myriad means, including settlements with us for our old business. Okay? To this day, in like 15 or 20 states, you can't stake Ethereum or Solana on a whole bunch of exchanges in the United States. Okay? And, and that's because basically they're fighting with Coinbase and others that, that those staking processes where they're in the middle are security offerings. Now, my personal feelings on that don't matter. We capitulated and we said, look, we're going to settle this out, and we're not going to do it that way anymore. So to your question, what we did is we went back to the drawing board. And we said, okay, let's, let's just assume that we're going to bite the bullet and play

• 6:33Speaker 02

  nice and, and basically say that, you know, we're going to offer some type of securities account for doing this in a very simple manner. What's the most straightforward way to do that? In other words, come in and register. And when we analyze, what we realized is, is that there is a wealth advisory model in the United States that should allow you to do this. So we investigated, we documented, we argued with lawyers over the course of almost a year. And we basically came up with a registered investment advisory model, RIA model, that allows us to offer yield, staking, lending, basic investment in crypto through, again, through this RIA model. But it also, it's, it's beautiful for a couple of reasons.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  One, you're not a liability on my balance sheet, right? Which means if we go away, you still retain title to your assets. So for the people listening to this, it's kind of a tough pill to swallow, who are still fighting, you know, with the estates of Celsius and FTX and BlockFi and Voyager, to get their assets back. That can't happen here. Okay? Because you're retaining title and it uses what we call a separately managed account structure, which many high net worth investors are familiar with from the equity space. SMAs manage trillions of dollars in assets in the United States and similar models around the world. So to my knowledge, we were able to get approval for this through a lot of hard work on the legal side and are the first to do so in the United States. So there are

• 8:02Speaker 02

  other RIAs for crypto in the United States, but they're not directly for consumers via an account model doing yield, staking, lending, so you can deposit Bitcoin in your SMA and borrow dollars out, right? And we use DeFi, this is the cool part, we use DeFi for 100% of our lending and, and yield and staking services, right? Abra is not a counterparty to any transaction in the system. We're simply deploying out of the SMA on behalf of our clients, which is what an advisor is supposed to do. And that's a big breakthrough, as far as I know. I'm not familiar with any other pure play service that does yield where it's 100% based on DeFi now.

• 8:46Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think about this new model, there's really three components in my mind. There's the regulatory kind of structure and approval. There is the SMA component, and then there is the interfacing with DeFi. There's a lot of bells and whistles, but like those are kind of three main components, right? On the regulatory approval, I use approval specifically because you can't just elect to be an RIA. And all of a sudden, like you just start acting like an RA. You gotta go, you gotta present an application to SEC or another regulatory bodies all evaluate this. And there's somebody who says, okay, yep, thumbs up, you get approved, knock yourself out. What was that process like? And I'm assuming it wasn't just like sending the application, a day later, they send back the approval.

• 9:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So what did you have to do to get through that to actually become an approved RIA?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  As a matter of fact, I think a day later, they sent back denied.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  And, and we kind of expected it, you know, we, we lawyered up, we have multiple law firms. I mean, look, the last couple of years has been a legal nightmare for everyone who's survived. All right, I've talked, I've spoken to every CEO that you know in this space at one time or another over the last couple of years, and it has been brutal. Now, it's, it's, it's, it's less brutal than dying, right? To a degree, because you know, you, you gotta, I mean, the stress every day. Okay, so no, no sympathy gained, I'm sure on any of that. But we basically lawyered up last summer, documented every nuance of what we thought we would need to document,

• 10:15Speaker 02

  put an entirely new compliance program in place, because this model is different than the way we operated via retail in the past. Put an entirely new platform in place because of the separately managed account structure that I described before, that's a new architecture, right? We have to put staff through compliance training. You have all kinds of disclosure requirements, just to get to the point where we submitted the application. I'm not using the legal terminology, but whatever the, the right term is, the application to the SEC took us the better part of, of almost a year. Okay, so it's a lot of upfront work. So this idea of you want to be an RIA on Tuesday, you wake up and on Wednesday you're an RIA. That's never, that's not going to happen. That's nonsense.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Okay, so yes, tremendous amount of work. You lawyer up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. You know, more than one iteration with the SEC, a whole bunch of compliance training and new systems. Your communications get monitored when you're, you know, when you come in and register, et cetera, et cetera.

• 11:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And then talk about the SMAs, right? Obviously, lots of investors use them. It would have helped investors in some of these cases with these other platforms. Do you think that the industry now like SMAs are going to end up being the standard? Or do you still see there being kind of pooled funds? And the SMA is one option, but there will be plenty of assets still kept in other models?

• 11:41Speaker 02

  I, I think you would have to be crazy to put, you know, six, seven, eight, nine figures of assets into a pooled model, given everything we've learned over the last few years. So many people have talked about this, you know, the mismatch between how crypto transactions move, how banks work. You know, talk about the ETFs for a second. What happened a couple of weeks ago when Iran sent drones and aircraft to Israel? What happened to Bitcoin that weekend? And so, you know, retail investors, okay, I've got a bunch of, you know, a few thousand dollars in my IRA or my 401K. You know, the price went down fine. But if you're sitting on millions of dollars in crypto

• 12:27Speaker 02

  and you basically want to hedge yourself on Saturday night, can't do it, right? Banks are closed more than they're open, right? Stock market's closed more than it's open. So I would posit that a vehicle that trades 24/7, the same way Bitcoin trades and makes that accessible 24/7 is the right way to do this. And high net worth investors have known this for decades. Right, we're just now making it available to everyone. And that's a breakthrough. So exchanges are not meant for basically buy-hold investing. They're meant for trading and speculation. That's fine, there's a place for that, right? We're basically saying there is a place for investors to invest, and that's different from trading.

• 13:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And then talk to me about the interfacing with DeFi. Obviously, it's exciting. I think that, you know, there's a lot of people probably say, hey, this is part of the like promise of a lot of this technology.

• 13:22Anthony Pompliano?

  But at the same time, are there risks? Or how do you think about like the pros and cons of this decision, both for your business and for the user?

• 13:28Speaker 02

  So the way I think about accessing DeFi through Abra now, through Abra Capital Management, is that we want to make the risks the same as if you knew what you were doing in accessing DeFi via MetaMask. Okay, so with the caveat that we're not going to go full on DGEN and choose brand new protocols that have $10 million total value locked and make them accessible to our high net worth clients. Okay, we're going to do upfront homework as we have for years because we've been using DeFi for a long time. It's just this is the first time we're making it available as a standard. Okay, so what we do is we go in and we choose, right?

• 14:10Speaker 02

  The DeFi systems that have the most TVL, are the most liquid, have the most kind of tried and true transaction volume and represent the best investment opportunities in terms of yield, interest rates, et cetera, et cetera, for our clients. And we make those available to them. And basically what's happening is it's like the advisor is deploying via a MetaMask like model, but in a way that our clients don't have to understand this conversation. The risk disclosures associated with DeFi, they can read, right? To the SEC's point all along, people aren't disclosing the risk. Well, we do, right? There's a long set of documents that they have access to, they've seen that are actually on the SEC's website that disclose all this.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  And the clients can read them in detail, ask questions or not, it's their choice. And then they tell us where they want to deploy and we manage the deployment for them. But again, 100% DeFi based. And so far, the clients seem to love it.

• 15:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And what are the advantages on the DeFi? Obviously, there's the decentralization and kind of no counterparty or a different counterparty that the user is interfacing with. But are there higher yields available? Are there lower fee, you know, structures? Like, what are some of the other things that the clients now are starting to experience?

• 15:26Speaker 02

  So, so, so there's several advantages. You alluded to one, which is you're not, you're not taking named corporate counterparty risk, meaning you're not taking counterparty risk to Abra, you're not taking counterparty risk to a named borrower, which was the model that, you know, the dead companies in the, in the yield space were doing. You're, you're, you're taking pure DeFi risk. Now, if you, if you remember in the early days of the Celsius bankruptcy, all, nothing was getting repaid with one exception. They had some exposure to, to DeFi and they had to pay back those loans or they were going to get liquidated. And they did because the system worked as correct as it was supposed to and you couldn't stop it, right? Meaning there's no off switch. And that's how it's supposed to work. Right?

• 16:10Speaker 02

  So, so the beauty there is, is that you're not taking any counterparty risk other than the fact that you're taking smart contract risk and we're leveraging smart contracts that have been tested in some cases for years now. And that's what we want. Right? And we explain that to our clients. And so the other benefit is that yes, there's opportunities that we can recommend that our clients rotate into on occasion because, you know, Bitcoin might be paying, you know, abnormally high yield, like nine or 10%, which happens on occasion. And a lot of times you can't capture it very quickly, you know, if you don't know what you're doing as a kind of a metamask user who doesn't know how to deploy into contracts. And we can text the client or email a client and say, hey, want to get on the phone because

• 16:54Speaker 02

  there's an opportunity here for something we've been testing with our own money that we think you should consider deploying into. And we can now recommend that fairly quickly for our clients. And it's very, very easy for our quants, our analysts to test these new, these new opportunities as they unfold and they are every day. And, and we have a group that does nothing but test those things. And so that's the advantage that our clients have now.

• 17:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And then talk about what I'll call kind of high net worth accredited, you know, private clients, institutions, and then you also are able to service unaccredited investors as well. And so like, what are the differences that you're seeing across these different groups?

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. So, so I would say on the high end, we have mining clients that take advantage of structured products hedging. You know, they're, they're using auto liquidation capabilities on our over the counter trading desk. And, you know, obviously our, our lower end, our retail clients don't need that. Uh, most of them want to buy and hold and they can earn some yield on their dollars. So I'm sure that's fine. So again, on the high end, it might be everything from, you know, large block orders for trading. You know, hedging positions via, you know, the mining, uh, you know, mining auto liquidations to crypto ATM networks. They have to replenish on a Sunday when markets are screaming. Uh, we do a lot of that as well.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  So, so that's kind of a high end, very, um, traditional prime model, right? They might be looking to trade on credit, which we wouldn't be in a position to do for retail, for example. So they'll onboard and send us financials and go through risk management and things like that. High net worth retail, probably the, the most bespoke thing they're interested in doing is borrowing against their Bitcoin. Right? So they'll basically say, oh, I'm going to park X million dollars worth of Bitcoin and I want to borrow Y dollars. And so we'll basically, again, use DeFi through the RIA to manage those loans for them going forward. Which is really cool, right? So basically like they're not taking counterparty risk to Abre even for the loan.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  So they're just borrowing directly from a DeFi protocol. And then on the low end, it could easily be, you know, I want to buy $25,000 worth of Bitcoin. I'm happy to park it in a yield account. I want to leave a hundred thousand dollars of stable coins and I'll dollar cost average in over time. It's as simple as that, right? So you've got a whole gamut of services that we're able to offer now because we've carefully put the right legal structures in place.

• 19:22Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the interesting, I think, kind of developments that we're going to have to see here is, uh, for the last couple of years, it's been like Bitcoin and crypto are one end of the spectrum, traditional finances on the other. The ETF is starting to bridge the gap. Is your vision that eventually we will just see like, I'll have an investment account? And I could have stocks, I can have crypto, I can have kind of these different assets and like, Maybe companies like Abra are actually backing into being full-fledged kind of financial service providers?

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. So when you're full on in crypto, putting real-world assets aside, you're inside of the matrix, right? That's how, that's my favorite analogy. And an ETF, kind of like an exchange, represents a hard line into the matrix. The, the exchange hard line is good because it works 24/7, except for bank wires, right? Those can only be processed, you know, 15 to 20 hours a week. ETFs can only basically buy and sell 30 hours a week, 35 hours a week, whatever it is. So those hard lines have a lot of limitations. The SMA puts you inside the matrix. Separately managed account puts you inside the matrix.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  So you're using something that in the background works very similar to how you and I would just use MetaMask to deploy in a DeFi. That's super cool. And then, and then we also give you the wire access to be able to get your stable coins into the system, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that this is the future for wealth management, not only for crypto, but full, full stop. Because real-world assets, once they're tokenized, are going to be, are going to end up in these securities accounts as well. And then you can basically make tokenized real estate fungible with Bitcoin through an SMA. And then choose which asset you're going to borrow against using some oracle to decide what the price or value of the assets is in order to give you the loan. Super, super interesting, right?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  So, so I do think that there's a bifurcation coming between trading and investing, right? And trading makes sense on exchanges, you know, through our prime business, just like others have prime businesses. And investing, traditionally through advisors, we're just giving you a next-generation architecture that's still compliant with the existing rules.

• 21:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And I saw recently that there's a proposal to make the stock market trade 24/7. I don't know if it'll get approved or not, but gets at some of these, you know, points that maybe the crypto industry has pushed forward by just existing, where there's traders in the traditional market who are like, hey, these guys could trade 24/7, like, why can't we? Do you think that stuff will happen? And like, are you anticipating many of the advantages that the crypto market has had will come to these traditional assets?

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Sure. So, look, we've been, we used to call it straight through processing. I was at Goldman in the early 90s and we were talking about straight through processing 30 years ago, and here we are still talking about it and it doesn't exist. I think there are a lot of entities, I'm looking up here just trying to think this through, but I think there's a lot of entities disincentivized for this to happen in the US in the short term. I do think that T plus zero or straight through processing or real time settlement 24/7 for equities is going to happen outside the US relatively soon in certain markets. And I think it will be a good attractor, meaning, meaning list on our market, and I'm making this up now, in Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Singapore, markets that have been open to this stuff, or in Switzerland, Switzerland a little older, might take a while, but, but probably more open

• 22:47Speaker 02

  than the US anyway, and that'll be an attraction because this is, it's a competitive planet. You don't have to list your US stock in a NASDAQ or NYC, you can list it in Asia or Europe or Singapore, whatever, whatever, right? And so I think that this is going to be a competitive advantage for certain markets that can move faster than the US. I think the implication of your question was, what is the US going to do? And I think that we will get to, you know, from T plus five to T plus zero over the next X years, I don't know what X is, I would venture a guess that it's less, it's, it's, it's less than 10 and more than three, and, and will probably require a new administration that is

• 23:27Speaker 02

  more investor friendly and, and recognizes that the tokenization of assets isn't the second coming of Satan.

• 23:35Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned other geographies. What are you all seeing with either clients in other geographies or partners in terms of their enthusiasm, their capital flows, you know, various things that they're doing on that front?

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so look, I I I'm super bullish on a bunch of things. I mean, real world assets started with stable coins. And by the way, I actually group Bitcoin in the real world asset category now, which I'm maybe I'm the first to do that. I don't know, because we're seeing people borrow against it. So, once you can borrow against a commodity, to me, it's a real world asset. But we're seeing like, you know, globally miners trying to figure this out. Do I do I? What portion do I liquidate? Where do I take risk? How do I hedge? How do I borrow? Huge flows there, getting inbound questions all the time. Can you help us with the overflow on stuff that we can't fulfill the exchanges on the on the ETFs? We do, I do a ton of work, you know, with high net worth investors. I speak at a lot of

• 24:33Speaker 02

  high net worth investor events, not not crypto specific, right? I generally, this is more like, you know, how do I diversify away from, you know, real estate stocks into other uncorrelated things? And it feels like an order of magnitude more interesting and even bigger than it did in 21, when we were starting to ride the yield wave back then, right? So this feels bigger. And I would posit that institutions outside of crypto native aren't here yet. We've talked about it. And when we say BlackRock, BlackRock is servicing retail today, right? If you think about who's buying these ETFs, it's 401ks, it's it's IRAs, it's it's, you know, the E trades,

• 25:15Speaker 02

  right? They're now, we're now seeing, I'm hearing permission coming from institutions to participate in some cases via the ETF. So I do predict in the second half of the year, we're going to see a lot of institutions come in via these equity vehicles, which has been fantastic marketing for Avarice so far, right? Because when I explain, like we did talk about earlier, like the difference between buying ETF and SMA, if you if you're investing more than half a million dollars, the SMA wins almost every time. Right, for the reasons that we've already talked about. And so, so, so I think that there's the existing flows and we have, I think, a pretty good understanding of where the new flows are going to be coming from over the next few, few months and years.

• 25:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And then what is the kind of end state for Abra over the next, you know, five or 10 years? So you're talking a lot about the industry, but like, what is the thing that you guys are driving towards? And when you guys sit down in your product meeting, that kind of product, you know, pipeline, what does that look like?

• 26:11Speaker 02

  So, so I'm going to put the legal terminology aside for a second. So I'm going to use some terms that the, that the regulators don't like me to use. So, so, so I see Abra long term as a big global bank for crypto. Okay. Now, I'm not using the term the way the regulators agree with or whatever. I'm just saying, what does it mean to be a bank? It means you can hold your stuff, you can, you can earn interest on your stuff and you can borrow against your stuff, right? You know, whether it's HELOC on a house or, or borrowing against your Bitcoin, which I think is going to be the biggest and fastest growing aspect of lending over the next 20 years globally. Right? Because if you have this asset that's just going to Valhalla and, and people who didn't have access to credit can borrow against it instantly, that's going

• 26:54Speaker 02

  to be just a boon for lending. Right? So, so I see Abra as being on a path to becoming the premier global crypto bank via whatever regulatory means we have to do that. Now, when we first, when you and I first met, like, I don't know, maybe eight years ago, you know, we were talking about money transfer and payments. And I think that's all coming, right? Now, we're getting there in a, in a different way than what I had either predicted or maybe even wanted versus when I first had the ideas for all this pre Ethereum was just Bitcoin, but we're getting there. Right? And, and now we have stable coins. I had to invent a synthetic dollar in the early days of Abra because there was no Ethereum. I was just too early. And now all this infrastructure

• 27:35Speaker 02

  is there, right? I can easily access DeFi to process loans and do money transfer and all the things I want to do. And so we may be working from the top down in terms of institutions, high net worth investors, you know, middle class investors and hopefully sooner rather than later to the bottom of the pyramid. But, you know, legally, it's, Unfortunately, the further down the pyramid you go from an income perspective, the harder it gets legally, which it should be the opposite, honestly. But, but we have what we have. And, and so that's my vision. My vision is to be the premier global crypto bank that services every aspect of, of the income pyramid for, you know, the next generation, which is DeFi based. And, you know, we're just going to make it easily accessible to everyone, starting at the top and making

• 28:20Speaker 02

  our way down.

• 28:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that that is incredibly compelling as you guys go to build it. The last thing I'll leave with you is there's great debate on Bitcoin, smart contract platforms, various assets, et cetera. What do you think people's portfolios look like five or 10 years from now? Is it like Bitcoin is a store of value? And then all these other things are kind of like technology stocks that they're, you know, trying to figure out where value accrues? Or how do you just think about like the portfolio construction and how that will evolve?

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had dinner with a very famous CIO from a large RIA last night. And we were having a raging debate about what it means to, to hold cash flow assets like a stock versus real estate versus Bitcoin. And, and I was making the case that every time I look at an investment opportunity, and I see a lot, you know, I've been living in Silicon Valley for 30 years, I compare it to my crypto holdings. And I say, you know, do I believe that the cash flow potential from this stock over five years warrants of me selling or giving up, you know, a piece of my Bitcoin, a piece of my Solana, a piece of my Ethereum? And 99.9% of the time right now, the answer is no. Okay, so that's me.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  And I, I have conviction for why this is an exponentially growing technology and how that maps out. But, but getting back to reality for the average investor, I do think you're going to see real world assets become tokenized, especially starting outside the US like you talked about. And you're going to have all these investment services that basically make them all fungible, meaning I can hold real estate, I can hold stocks, I can hold bonds, I can hold crypto, native crypto. And, and they're all fungible because they're all tokens I can trade across each other or borrow against. I can pool real estate, Bitcoin and, and stocks and, and take one loan. Right, because it's in one separately managed account and it has a value. So how is it going to break down in terms of native crypto holdings versus stocks and real estate?

• 30:20Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think that we're just in the, still in the very, very beginning of the global investment community getting exposure to the native crypto stuff, Bitcoins, Solana, Ethereum, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's going to go to, you know, what is it now? Two and a half trillion? I think that's going to go to 50 trillion, you know, over the next 10 years. And if not sooner. And, you know, that's going to change everything because now you're going to have these credit markets that just weren't possible before because nobody had to, knew how to give people in the Philippines credit or give people in India credit. And they will now. Right?

• 30:57Anthony Pompliano?

  50 trillion dollars is a big number, but the trajectory seems to be headed that way for sure. So I think there's a lot of people who are excited about that happening, but there's a lot of work to do between here and here and there. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about what Abra is or if they want to download, sign up, et cetera?

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. Abra.com is a great place to get some more information on what we're doing. I'm reasonably active these days on Twitter, Billbar X on Twitter and Abra Global on Twitter. So we're pretty easy to find. We're out there and we're pretty engaged.

• 31:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, Bill. Well, listen, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I think the people will really enjoy this one. And as always, we'll definitely do it again in the future.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Thanks, Matt. Great to see you.