#1555 Bill Barhydt | This Bitcoin Rally Feels Different

Bill Barhydt is the Founder & CEO of Abra. In this conversation we talk about the macro environment, tariffs, bitcoin, bitcoin treasury companies, tokenization, and what the future could look like.========================Figure Markets is where crypto meets real-world finance. Trade 24/7 with speed and transparency, borrow against your crypto with no credit checks, and earn—all on-chain. Stocks and real estate trading are coming soon, giving you 24/7 access and instant settlement. It’s the best of TradFi and DeFi in one platform. Get started today at https://www. Figure.com/pomp! Disclosures: https://www.figuremarkets.com/disclosures/=======================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/=======================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.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on guys? Today we've got an excellent episode with Bill Barhydt. He's the founder and CEO of Abra. Abra is a RIA that is specifically focused on helping high net worth individuals do things with their crypto, store it, borrow against it, earn yield, etc. It's all financial services that you get in the traditional world, but now you can get it inside of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. In this conversation, we talk about a lot, including what's going on in the macro environment, tariffs, Bitcoin, Bitcoin all time high, what's going on with the Bitcoin treasury companies? And then what should we think about tokenization and all of the things that are coming from the crypto world and meeting into that traditional financial system? Obviously, the future is very bright and people are very excited, but Bill has been at this for a long time. He's got some very unique thoughts that I think you guys will find very valuable. So here's my latest conversation with Bill Barhydt.

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Bill, I thought our grip has started the conversation is the macro environment, once again, seems to be very, very relevant for Bitcoin. We obviously have seen tariff announcements on, tariff announcements off, back on again, back off again, threats, not threats. Throughout all of this Bitcoin went down for a while, down to 75,000, rip rate back up. It feels like the world is waking up to, could Bitcoin be the solution? Could Bitcoin be the like life raft that will get you out of all the chaos and uncertainties? Is that what you are thinking?

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think people in the know kind of accept that it is, and I think the gyrations day to day may be partially news driven, but the macro direction, meaning if you zoom out, the more, the more, the further out you zoom, right, the more it looks like it's a liquidity suck, right? With gyrations hour to hour that might be semi news driven, like this morning, we had the tariff announcements, you know, Europe needs to move faster. So blah, blah, blah, right? And, and we saw what happened last time, right? Okay, yes, for a while the sky was falling, and then all of a sudden it, it looked like it was back to the overlay of the liquidity, you know, cycles, right? And I think that's what's happening now. So, you know, anybody

• 1:49Speaker 01

  who basically was panicking this morning because Bitcoin fell 3.5% has not been paying attention, right? And, and so I think we're going to see more of this, this cycle because of the nature of the money printing, the negotiations, you know, Trump feeling like he has to tweet every thought he has, every minute he has them and things like that, but, but, but by When you zoom out, it does look like Bitcoin has become that overlay. Look, if you accept that the network itself has value, right? Just using kind of traditional network theory and you overlay and with a fixed float. And you overlay that on top of that, something that is constantly increasing in the floats. This has to happen.

• 2:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  It has to happen. And so people, you know, get so afraid of the gyrations day to day that they forget the basic network theory, the value of a network, right? There is a formula to value a network. And when you value the network that's growing in terms of something that is being devalued, the formula actually acts as a lever on top of what you're devaluing. And people don't understand the math of that.

• 3:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Where's the money coming from into Bitcoin? Like there's money printing going on, but there's also other store of value assets. And I think a lot of people historically thought that Bitcoin would surpass gold, but because gold market cap would contract, people would basically demonetize gold. It would go into Bitcoin. The exact opposite has happened, like gold is growing and Bitcoin is growing. So is all of the like net new capital, you know, flowing into Bitcoin just printed money? Or do you see it coming from other pots of money, maybe in an investor's portfolio?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  So we talk about this a lot at Abra, meaning where are the flows coming? We like to look at the flows, smart asset managers look at flows. So we see three buckets and I think there's more that if you're more nuanced, but three buckets, basically. Long-term holders like the OG crowd, and we love them because they're all borrowing against their Bitcoin. They don't want to sell. So that's a target audience for Abra to process loans again. So, so long-term holders. Two is kind of the new holders who we don't know yet if they're going to be long-term holders or short-term. And the upside and downside of the ETFs are kind of the same, meaning it's really easy to get into Bitcoin now through a traditional brokerage account for most brokerages, but it's equally easy to get out.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Now, if it's in a 401k or an IRA, maybe, but you could sell out, reallocate within the 401k and IRA. So, so that's bucket number two. And bucket number three is the float left for traders. There's a fourth bucket, which is the Bitcoin that's gone forever, but I'm leaving that aside. So that third bucket is actually shrinking over time, meaning there's less Bitcoin being actively traded. And so, you know, which leads to, okay, well, where is that kind of liquidity suck for all coins going to come from eventually? But, but what people don't realize is, is while it's shrinking, it's still a huge amount of money. Right? And for the $2 trillion asset, my guess is, is like even 35% of the float is still available for, for, for day to day trading, which is a lot, right?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  And, and so, you know, that leaves a lot of room, right? For not only upside, but you know, if the demand is coming in from these corporations and, and retail hasn't really even started yet. This is the most hated rally I've ever seen, right?

• 5:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, there's, Google search volume is low, media, they're, they're mentioning it, but it's not mania by any means, right? And it definitely feels like, uh, you can talk to multiple people throughout a day. And if you're like, oh, Bitcoin's back at an all time high, some of them know, but a lot of them don't.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Historically, the two ways that we were able to determine whether this rally was retail loved or hated, was perpetual future leverage. And, and it used to be the premium on the, on the grayscale stuff. And now it's kind of the premium on micro strategy. But the, the perpetual future leverage ratios are at all time lows relative to where we are in the rally. Meaning, meaning if retail was on board, the amount of leverage in the system would be much higher than it is now. Right? And so what that tells me is, is that there's a lot of room to the upside. And the downside swings shouldn't be as much as they were in the past, specific to Bitcoin, I mean.

• 5:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, you mentioned the Bitcoin treasury company strategy, there's Meta Planet, there's many of these things. It feels like, uh, on one hand, this is the Hail Mary that gets caught every time, right? You put Bitcoin on your balance sheet, your stock goes up, everything's amazing.

• 6:04Anthony Pompliano?

  But there's also risk and there's leverage being used. There are these premiums, you know, some people say, hey, look, there's this NAF premium, doesn't make sense, it's going to collapse. Other people say, no, that's like, you know, future cash flow multiples, or you know, however you want to think about it. How do you evaluate when these things come out, whether you or Abra, like, should we buy? Should we not? Is this something we should support or, or not? In terms of both the positives and the negatives?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the, the vast majority of the public should be holding the underlying, just buy Bitcoin. If you want to have a small coin allocation, Solana, Sui, whatever, that's fine, but just buy Bitcoin, even Sailor. To his credit, I don't know if he just feels compelled to tell people that he really believes it. But, but look, people who have to buy equities or, or for whatever reason, want a levered bet that's equity based, will buy MicroStrategy, right? It is a levered bet. So, so the downside on this is that, and it would be easier if I had a piece of paper in front of me, but, but think about the amount of leverage that's being used. The formula works well if the amount of leverage, right, that's being used is less than the devaluation of the dollar that's being absorbed, but that's not the case right now.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Meaning they're leveraging themselves collectively as a, as a corporate treasury. Let's take all the companies in the aggregate that are trying to buy Bitcoin right now and overlay the amount of leverage that they're taking at shareholder expense. That leverage is higher than the rate of devaluation of the dollar.

• 7:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that on the low end, you have kind of like mid-single-digit leverage. And then on the high end, you've got like, I think, 27, 25%, something like that.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so that's, that, that sounds right. And so by definition, right, there's a huge risk there because if the dollar devaluation slows and you start to get it to a position where, um, you know, that, that, what they call that MNAV is not, uh, growing, you're going to have an unwind problem. So you can unwind these positions exactly the same way you wound them in, in the first place, right? And if that happens, you could see a precipitous fall in, in, in the price of Bitcoin while the market catches up to that. I don't think it would just crash Bitcoin, but it would certainly fall, you know, you could see a 15, 20%, 25% drop in the price relatively quickly if, if for some reason, if, if, if we had massive austerity measures, right?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  The first stocks that would get hit, in my opinion, are the Bitcoin stocks, right? And, and it's not because Bitcoin becomes worth that much less instantly. It's because of their leverage versus the valuation perception of the dollar in the midterm.

• 8:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I guess also if, uh, you know, a, a good exercise is like, let's say that strategy or meta planner, whoever came out and said, we're done buying Bitcoin. Then I think that the premiums do collapse

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 8:42Anthony Pompliano?

  On day one.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:42Anthony Pompliano?

  It doesn't mean that they go negative and it's a discount to NAV. It just means they probably go closer to NAV.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Those premiums are forward looking expectations on leverage.

• 8:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  And if there's no incremental leverage coming into the system, those premiums should look like an ETF. The only reason they don't is because they believe they're going to get diluted with more shares with the value of Bitcoin growing faster than the amount of dilution, which is the perpetual motion machine that everybody perceives that Sailor has figured out.

• 9:05Anthony Pompliano?

  If you're a shareholder, then the NAV premium collapse back to NAV could mean a lower share price, right? So there's a potential loss there, but for the company, that doesn't mean that you have to sell your Bitcoin.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  No.

• 9:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? That just means, hey, look, now we just traded NAV and we still own a bunch of Bitcoin, whatever. Is there a scenario where something can happen and they've got to kind of puke back out all the Bitcoin that they've been buying, in your opinion? Like, I guess if people are demanding a payment of converts that aren't converting to ETF.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  No, I think, I think my understanding, because I'm not an expert on what Sailor's setup, my understanding is, is that I don't see a scenario under which he would have to sell all the Bitcoin. If there was a rapid pullback, he might have to sell some to deal with the fact that the current note holders are underwater and they can't, they're not going to convert.

• 9:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Right? So that amount of Bitcoin would have to be sold. Now, if it went to zero quickly, he's screwed, but we're all screwed at that point, right? So, so, but I think it would fall, it would create a cycle where it would fall, you know, to create maximum pain and then recover. But a small amount of Bitcoin would probably have to be sold in the very worst case scenario. Now, some of the others have a lot more leverage. I could see those stocks going to zero or crashing or creating big problems with shareholders and then having shareholder lawsuits, et cetera, et cetera. Because I don't think, I think you can make the case that the shareholders don't understand the amount of inherent leverage in the systems that they're investing in. And by the way, I'm not saying that these are all bad things to be doing. I think it's, it's actually kind of interesting that we're, we're using money to test these things, especially if it's not my money.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  But, but at the end of the day, you know, there is a risk that these things don't work. The big bet here, again, I'll say it again, is, is that the United States continues to devalue the dollar at rate X. And if the amount of leverage or rate Y is slightly higher than X, this can actually work, you know, with, with some volatility for quite a while. If Y gets too high, meaning that amount of leverage gets too high versus the rate of devaluation of the dollar, and new money stops coming in because there's other places to put the money, right? That's a big problem.

• 11:07Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about areas outside of Bitcoin, there are stable coins, there's tokenization that all the big banks are talking about. What are the areas that you see that are one, exciting to you and to Abra, but also you think are legit going to happen, right? Because there's people who are promising the world.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:25Anthony Pompliano?

  But are there certain areas where you're like, all right, these are the main things right now that we're focused on or paying attention?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll open the kimono for you. We're very clear on this at Abra. I mean, so, so the fastest growing business at Abra is people opening up their RIA accounts, their registered investment advisor accounts, putting Bitcoin in the vault and then borrowing against the value of that Bitcoin.

• 11:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  So that's, that's our fastest growing business today. And that kind of makes sense because as Bitcoin becomes a $2 trillion asset. Remember I said there's three buckets, those OGs have a lot of Bitcoin. Why don't they want to sell? Well, two big reasons. One, I think the price is going to go forever, given what we just discussed. And two, I don't want to pay taxes. Right. So we have a great solution for that. And we basically use DeFi marketplaces. So our rates are like five, six percent right now, whereas centralized lenders who are artificially, you know, have a cost of capital in the 10, 11% range are charging 15% for the same loans. Now, where do we go from here? My, my take is, is that the DeFi networks that we use to process those loans in the background. So our clients don't see this, right?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  They can ask, we explain it, it's all in our risk disclosures, but, but, but the model that we've come up with is there's an open marketplace, yield on one side, mostly dollar yield, right? Collateralized loans on the other side, right? Why is that relegated to Bitcoin right now? Well, Bitcoin is the native asset that is worth enough money to warrant those loans. But there are assets out there that you can easily pump into DeFi networks if you do the tokenization correctly, that now have a bid and an ask, which is all you need to facilitate the loan. Because you need to be able to liquidate if they don't make the payment.

• 12:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Right? And that's what DeFi does for you. It basically gives you that 24/7 liquidation. So that opens up the true value, in my opinion, of tokenization, which is that not only do you have access, we don't really have a big access problem in the US, but with, with 10 billion people you do, access, meaning I can buy and sell, but I also am liquid in terms of being able to have secondary markets via DeFi that I can borrow against the value of these assets for. So our belief and vision at Abra. Is is that you're going to have ultimate fungibility of anything and everything. So whether it's stocks, traditional stocks, right funds, REIT funds, metals, other types of, you know, hard to access, private equity, venture, higher risk stuff,

• 13:45Speaker 01

  prediction markets are all going to be fungible. And you're going to be able to borrow against the value of those assets using models like ours, right, that are actually relatively low risk. Because what we're saying to clients is borrow 30% of the value of that asset. Is there a chance that the value of the asset falls 90%? That's always going to be yes.

• 14:06Anthony Pompliano?

  100%.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Right? But if you're smart about the historical value of the underlying asset that you're borrowing against, there are ways to do this. People do it all the time with HELOCs, right? That's the most well-understood secondary lending market, right? For borrowing against the value of a fixed asset is HELOC loans in the United States. And there are similar models in Europe, et cetera, et cetera. We're simply saying, create a standardized fungible model to do this for everything. That's the big vision at Abra Long Term.

• 14:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's, uh, obviously finance is going in this direction. And the question I think is, one, how much of the market is Bitcoin going to eat from a capital, you know, kind of suck standpoint? But also, two, it maybe, I don't know, five years ago was 100% centralized in the traditional financial world, 0% decentralized. 20 years from now, it's not 100 and 0. It's some mix between central and decentralized. And I think that that's an open question as to like, where do we end up? Is it 50 50? Is it, you know, in favor of decentralization or centralization? And then you're probably never going to get the full stack to be decentralized, because you're still going to have centralized companies or centralized, you know, investors or centralized whatever. But you'll get maybe pieces of infrastructure, maybe it's markets or whatever.

• 15:23Anthony Pompliano?

  That as that decentralization comes in, there's a lot of benefits, right? And I actually think if you have more confidence in the decentralization, then obviously you should get more capital coming to the market. It's like a net positive for the whole thing, right?

• 15:33Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. And I'm also, I would say, you know, 25 years out, I'm probably bearish on the traditional asset management model, because I feel like the whole idea of securitization is going to change. Because right now, BlackRock's ownership model is based upon the idea of incorporation in the joint stock company. I actually think that that model doesn't make sense when you extrapolate 20 years out in the world of AI. DAOs and robots and autonomous organizations, I actually think cars are going to own themselves and you'll have eight robotic, you know, AI agents that run themselves. And so again, 25 years out, the model of asset management is going to be flipped on its head. And I think that the incumbents, many of them are not going to survive that model.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  So this, what I'm describing actually is, is, is what I often describe as kind of a post-fourth turning bank. What does a post-fourth turning bank look like? Well, it's going to be based upon decentralized rails, operate 24/7, always on, no borders, right? Our fun, create fungibility across asset types, deal with this new concept that's coming of DAOs instead of companies, as well as the historical companies and crypto, but all in one kind of big, you know, soup of a financial system, which most banks wouldn't even understand what I just said, never mind be ready for.

• 16:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. When, um, when you look at that, uh, post Turing, uh, type bank,

• 16:57Anthony Pompliano?

  where are the areas of opportunity? Obviously you're building a company that is tangentially related there, right? It's like, where do you guys see opportunities for yourself? But also, uh, where do you think maybe is the biggest exposure of risk to the legacy guys? It's like the last place that they'll go to be able to compete with kind of the upstarts.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are the right questions. And we get a lot of inbounds now, post-Trump administration coming in from mid-sized banks that are asking these questions. How do we get into crypto now? Should we just offer Bitcoin to our clients? Should we offer lending? What should we be doing? So, so from our perspective, for us as an, as a, you know, relative upstart relative to banks, and which is most crypto companies, I think the opportunity for us is to be the best possible crypto native bank that we can be for our clients. That means holding crypto assets, facilitating loans against crypto assets, preparing for the oncoming tokenization, which represents holding stocks as tokens, real estate as tokens, other investments as tokens, which are now liquid.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  So my bank account will be basically a revolving credit account against the value of those assets that I can spend in real time. Right, draw down on. And if I borrowing smartly against the assets that are appreciating quickly, I might not even be paying back my loans if I'm borrowing in the dollar, which is a perpetually depreciating asset, which I think long term is the demise of the dollar because that system is not viable in perpetuity, meaning, meaning you can't have a perpetual motion machine, which allows you to borrow forever against the depreciating asset. It just breaks down at some point, but at least I would guess for the next 20 years, that's going to work. And then, you know, we'll probably figure out how to spend in the native appreciating asset, which would be Bitcoin and, and, you know, potentially

• 18:38Speaker 01

  other, other, other tokens. But, but for now, right, we're building that crypto bank that allows you to buy, store, hold, borrow, earn yield. If I'm a bank, I'm saying to myself, okay, right, this business is growing much faster than ours.

• 18:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Hundred percent.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  I said five years ago, people asked me, you know, do you think we'll get to the point where the banks are buying the exchanges? I said, absolutely not. We're going to get to the point where the exchanges are buying banks because, because who's growing faster?

• 19:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  It's just common sense, right? So I believe in this cycle, the top five exchanges will be competing with each other to figure out which banks to buy to get in, in the door to figure out how to offer the plethora of services that they want to offer and brokerages as well, right? And, and, and that prepares them for this tokenization of everything, which creates the fungibility model. And then we kind of all back into competing with each other in some way with similar services. I think the traditional exchange model morphs into something which is less trader focused and more investor focused, which is a problem for them longer term because their fees are going to be compressed because, you know, that's why you're going to see all these models where, you know, you have monthly subscription fees instead of trading fees because they know what's coming, right?

• 19:46Anthony Pompliano?

  When, um, when you think about the change in regulation that has occurred that you're mentioning, um, what have been the biggest positive impacts on Abra? And then what are the things that are still roadblocks or obstacles that need to be changed?

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Well, the, the biggest benefit has been there's, you know, I don't have crazy people chasing me with flaming baseball bats trying to kill me all day. Uh, and, and, and so.

• 20:06Anthony Pompliano?

  That sounds good.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it sounds really good, right? I mean, it's like the little things, you know? So, um, and, and, and not even for doing anything, you know, wrong. I mean, like, like we were, um, like one of the few companies out there that did.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Went overboard to disclose when we had losses, you know, with Genesis and others, we tweeted about it. So, so that, that hurt, you know, and not having that anymore has been awesome. Right. And we're just as committed as we were then to following the rules. And we've always said, be very clear with us with what the rules are and, and we'll follow the rules. Even if I don't like the rules, it doesn't, my personal opinion on the rules, I'll come on here, pontificate, but ultimately doesn't matter, right? Because I'm going to follow the rules either way or I'll get out of business.

• 20:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Right. So that's number one. And I would say number two is we need a, a, a model in, in crypto that allows upstarts to get in without a baseline level of regulatory spend that's untenable. And so I'm hearing rumblings of this kind of sandbox model between like in the US, the CFTC and the SEC. And maybe it'll become a basis for other markets as well. Ours is a little more complicated. So maybe they don't need it as much, but this idea that you can operate in a model where especially for upstart DeFi type systems where you may not be decentralized yet, but you don't want to basically deal with all the complexities of securities, laws and dividends and issuance and all this stuff.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  And so maybe you have a path to get there that is tenable in terms of filings and cost, et cetera, et cetera. So, so, and, and we need clear rules of, of the road for that. I'm actually more concerned about that than I am about stablecoin legislation. I'm, I'm a little concerned about some of the nuances of the current stablecoin stipulation, uh, uh, regulation, but I don't think it's going to matter that much. Stablecoins exist today. They're going to exist next week after the, the, the legislation is signed and the world will go on.

• 22:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What about the banks? They're supposedly trying to all come together a little.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  That will happen.

• 22:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, a little, I don't know, maybe mafia is a bad terminology, a little group, uh, and create a stablecoin together. Is that like a?

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Rico, Rico by any other name. So, so I'm hearing rumblings that we are going to get a stablecoin from kind of the Zelle Kurutu and I, I, they should, um, if I was them, that's what I'd be doing. I think the government will support it. I think the problem that I have with the current legislation is, is they'll be able to pay yield on the stablecoin they create, whereas everybody else who's. Not a bank won't, right? And I think that's an unfair practice. Now, you can create a money market token and pay yield on that. The problem is if that's deemed a security, you're probably offering it outside the US. So, so you kind of back into some, some problems where you inadvertently create regulatory capture opportunities for, for the banks. And I don't think it was inadvertent. I think that was very conscious

• 22:53Speaker 01

  ploy on their part to basically say, okay, this is our opportunity to potentially own this in the US and let everybody, you know, fight it out in, in other markets. So.

• 23:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that it's a, it's a problem that uh,

• 23:08Anthony Pompliano?

  they would be able to do it?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Not really. I mean, look, it's still a dollar at the end of the day, right? Most consumers don't care, right? A dollar is a dollar is a dollar. Um, and they don't understand the nuance of where the treasuries and short-term securities are being held. The average person who uses USDC is probably completely unaware of what happened in, you know, March of, when was it, uh, uh, 24, when, when, you know, the banks went south? It seems like an eternity go now, but, but um, it's, it's, it's, I would like to see more competition. That's always my fallback position. You want to do what's right by the consumer, enable lots of competition and eventually, right, the, the, the cream will float to the top. I've always believed that. Um, regulatory capture is the opposite of that.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  So that's, I always like, that's my kind of guiding light when it, or North Star when it comes to regulation. Traditionally, uh, uh, less is good, right? Here, I would say, I think there's a provision that allows for smaller companies to not have to be OCC chartered and allows for money transmission and everything else to enable, um, you know, basic stable coins. And that's a good thing. Um, and you know, again, we're just talking about the dollar. My other concern, which I think they've addressed is, is that, okay, in traditional money markets, you can, or wire, you know, banks, you can receive euros from another bank and convert those to dollars. Those euros weren't created in the US. The original version of the legislation didn't allow for

• 24:32Speaker 01

  non-US issued stable coins, which makes no sense because you've now taken away the ability to send euros and have those euros converted to dollars. I think they've addressed that, which benefits the likes of Tether and, you know, other non-US issuers.

• 24:46Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think is the single biggest development that could happen this year? That is positive for Bitcoin?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Biggest single development this year?

• 24:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Like is there one last hurdle for us to jump over?

• 24:58Speaker 01

  I think Bitcoin is fine. You know, I don't think

• 25:00Anthony Pompliano?

  So do I.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  I think Bitcoin doesn't care about corporate adoption. I think retail is more important to Bitcoin long term than corporate adoption. I'm fine with it. You know, my company's holding Bitcoin. We're going to continue to put profits into Bitcoin. But I think it's the getting the public to understand that the government is like not anti or pro Bitcoin. It just is would be a big win because I do think there's this perception that the government was trying to kill crypto. And I don't think that that has really the reality of where we are now has caught up with the public yet. Right? There's definitely a red and blue issue with crypto right now because of how everything went down

• 25:44Speaker 01

  in the last election and we need that to go away. Right? You know, there's this kind of liberal perception in some circles right now that crypto is bad, it's a grift, et cetera, et cetera. And Bitcoin is obviously associated with that by proxy. And I would like for that to go away, but that's a people issue. It's not a Bitcoin issue, right? And so Bitcoin is working just fine. You know, there are some technology issues with Bitcoin that I'm concerned about that need to be addressed, but I think that the atomic nature of Bitcoin is working just fine and will continue to work just fine in the meantime.

• 26:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I completely agree. What's the like 60 second pitch on why some should use Zebra?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we are, I think, the ultimate place for high net worth investors, upper middle class, family office investors to hold crypto, hold their Bitcoin. It's bankruptcy remote, so you're getting a personal vault, right? That if Abra goes away, it's still yours. You're able to borrow against the value of crypto at low rates. You're able to earn yield on dollars, Bitcoin, stakable assets, et cetera, et cetera. And I haven't seen any place that soup to nuts has figured out how to offer that simple range of services to the average investor.

• 26:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I feel like people are very interested in borrowing against earning yield, like all the financial services that are available to them in the traditional world. They want this one, right?

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 27:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to do this and we'll do it again in the future.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  My pleasure, amigo. Great to see you.