#1563 Patrick McHenry | Washington Is Finally Embracing Bitcoin?!

Patrick McHenry is the former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and the Vice Chairman at Ondo Finance. In this conversation we talk about bitcoin, ETFs, bitcoin treasury companies, legislation around stablecoins, tokenization, and how Patrick sees the world evolving. =========================Invest as you spend with the Gemini Credit Card® (https://www.gemini.com/pomp). Sign up today and get approved by 6/30/25 to earn a $200 Bitcoin bonus. Terms apply (http://gemini.com/legal/credit-card-intro-promo-terms). The Gemini Credit Card is issued by WebBank. See rates & fees (https://www.gemini.com/legal/cardholder-agreement) for more details. Some exclusions apply to instant rewards in which rewards are deposited when the transaction posts. This content is sponsored by Gemini, but my opinions are my own.=========================Bitwise is one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto asset managers. As of December 31, 2021, the company managed over $1.3 billion across an expanding suite of investment solutions, which include the world's largest crypto index fund and other innovative products spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto equities. Whether you’re an individual, advisor, or institution, Bitwise provides intelligent access to crypto with your unique circumstances in mind. Visit www.bitwiseinvestments.com to learn more. Certain of the Bitwise investment products may be subject to the extreme risks associated with investing in crypto assets. Visit www.bitwiseinvestments.com/disclosures/ to learn more.=======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $500 in rewards.=======================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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  The action's on the court and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to US residents 21+ Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes and details.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Subaru. You know that place your mind always wanders to? The lake, the mountains, the homes of the people you love most? The completely redesigned 2026 Subaru Outback is built to help you get there. With legendary capabilities, standard symmetrical all wheel drive and the confidence to go further. The 2026 Subaru Outback. Love never looked so good. Visit Subaru.com/Outback to learn more.

• 0:58Anthony 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.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on guys? Today we've got an excellent episode with Patrick McHenry. He is the former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and he's the vice chair over at Ondo. In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin, the ETFs, what's going on with the Bitcoin treasury companies. Then we get into all of the legislation around stable coins and market structure down in DC. And lastly, we talk about tokenization, how Patrick McHenry sees the world evolving over the next decade. This conversation is packed with insights that come from one of Washington DC's most important players over the last few years when it comes to the intersection of politics and Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Here's my latest conversation with Patrick McHenry. All right, Patrick, I thought a great place to start this conversation is it feels like Bitcoin is now infiltrating both Wall Street and Washington DC.

• 2:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And part of that is the Bitcoiners are like pushing it into those two areas. But also, it does feel like both the, you know, investors on Wall Street and the politicians in DC, they're also pulling to a degree as well. In your experience, what is happening here at the intersection and like, why is it now that we're seeing Bitcoin actually infiltrate specifically maybe Washington DC from your perspective?

• 2:56Speaker 04

  It's across the Rubicon. I mean, this is, you know, we're, we're well past a decade from, you know, Satoshi's white paper. This is now about a mass adoption and real momentum. The fact is that Washington follows. Washington is not a leadership group, it's a following group, and they're following their constituents. Elected officials are following their constituents. Their constituents are jazzed about Bitcoin and digital assets generally. And because of that, you've seen this bipartisan group on Capitol Hill prioritize digital assets as well as this administration and this president in particular.

• 3:33Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you see the President of the United States, his cabinet, everyone seems to own Bitcoin, right? And one of the things that I've seen in finance is an institution does not start to participate or, you know, create a product or buy Bitcoin or whatever, until the people who make up that institution own Bitcoin themselves. It does feel like that is now a huge part of what's happening on Capitol Hill and kind of in Washington broadly. Is that your experience talking to various colleagues that you've had over the years?

• 4:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there's the, there's the whole idea, if you're messing around in a market or messing around with a product, you can then talk about it much more deeply. I mean, that's, that's a Cuban nature, right? And since we're a family program, I can't use the actual, I wouldn't use the actual term for this, but you're going to find out, right? If you can, if you, if you use it. So that's happening and that's now happening. So I served in Congress for 20 years and ethics rules prevented me from owning Bitcoin in legislating around digital assets. So I Serving government without having the ability to actually be on,

• 4:41Speaker 04

  you know, a decentralized exchange or a centralized exchange and buying and selling these products, just to get some usage, understand how it works and all that stuff. So I had to do it through other people and having other people walk me through the experience of it. All the while I'm trying to legislate and actually do what my constituents want is to provide some clarity in the place around digital assets.

• 5:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, there's been a lot of progress, I think, that has come out of Washington, but in kind of a weird way, right? You know, if you look at the SEC's approval of the Bitcoin ETFs, technically that is not politicians who are directly overseeing the decision, but there is an element of these regulatory bodies do report to the politicians. And so talk a little bit about maybe, you know, we're 18 months or so post that decision. Where are the regulatory bodies from the position of Congress? Or maybe some other kind of oversight over these regulatory bodies that seem to now be very much supportive of Bitcoin and crypto at large?

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Well, it's because of the election. This is fundamental to how we prioritize policy in the United States. Elections have consequences. This president got elected on a pro-digital asset platform, very aggressively so. This president is the most pro-digital asset, pro-crypto president we've ever seen. So he's made this a priority. And so therefore his appointees have been aligned with his view. You're seeing this at the CFTC, which regulates commodities. You're seeing this as the Securities Exchange Commission, which regulates securities.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  And most notably, one of the most anti-crypto regulators in the world was Gary Gensler heading up the Securities Exchange Commission. So to go from a pro-crypto, I'm sorry, a highly anti-crypto Chair of the SEC, who's running that agency, to a very pro-crypto regulator of the SEC has a dramatic influence on this. But it all comes from the election and the election prioritized digital assets and made very clear to the elected officials, we need action both legislatively and regulatorily.

• 6:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that that's also leading to some of these like Bitcoin treasury companies that have popped up? Like it does feel you get the election, you get the change in the regulatory structure. Obviously investors, they're capitalists, they want to make money, but they do maybe feel like the waters are a little warmer. Like, you know, you can kind of come in now and they don't have to kind of look over their shoulder and that's really fueling some of these new trends that we're seeing in the industry?

• 7:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like, it's like they want like virtual reality rather than the reality. They, instead of going swimming, they want pictures of people swimming. No, it shows that Wall Street and highly regulated financials have wanted to be in this, in these waters rather than look at a simulation, but were prevented by the Biden administration regulators from engaging in this. That comes from clear memos at these agency, at the agency level, clear directive out of the White House. And, and so they are now getting into these waters, but they should have been doing this or could have been doing this a few years ago, had they had regulators

• 7:51Speaker 04

  that were thoughtful about it, or at least modestly thoughtful about it, unlike the agency heads that Biden appointed by, by and large.

• 8:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, we've got these two bills that everyone's talking about. And, you know, I spend most of my time talking about the industry at large. And frankly, when I first went to Washington DC, I went for two days, I think it was in 2018 or 2019, I got invited down by some staffers. And I went and I met with a bunch of the different congressmen's office and really it was with the staffers more so than the elected officials themselves. And I walked out of there and I said, we got a long way to go. That was my big takeaway. Fast forward to today, now, these bills are some of the most important things that are actually being talked about in Washington DC. So we got the stablecoin bill, we got the market structure bill. The first question is like, why are they different bills? I think that you've got some unique thoughts here, but like, like two different bills for something that seems

• 8:42Anthony Pompliano?

  to come from the same industry, almost seems like it's, you know, just doing it twice, you know, banging your head against the wall instead of just doing it once.

• 8:49Speaker 04

  So I was the chair of the Financial Services Committee, the last Congress, and I was a ranking member, lead Republican, lead minority leader on the Financial Services Committee.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  For four years before that. So I, under then Chairman Maxine Waters, started the conversation around crypto and legislating on crypto. And then Chair of the Committee Maxine Waters was much more interested in legislating around stable coins, and her team was as well. So I thought, well, we'll engage in that. We can, we can take a baby step here to legislating around digital assets. And we'll just do stable coins. This is a pretty easy thing to actually legislate around. We have an existing regulatory process at the state level that we could crib from. And New York being the, the, the big regulator of stable coins in the United States.

• 9:42Speaker 04

  So we'll take their experience, we'll apply it to the federal level. We'll take some additional federal laws, we'll apply it to these payment rails for, for a stable coin. It's a pretty simple product. Okay. And so we cut and pasted from existing law by and large at the federal level and built a stable coin regime and, and tried to legislate around that. That's one initiative. The other initiative was a market structure bill. We had the fight between the CFTC, which regulates commodities like Bitcoin, or the futures market, right? Commodities, futures, market, and, and crop futures, things of that sort. So Bitcoin is clearly a commodity, not a security.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  But we had a food fight between the CFTC and the SEC. We also had to define what's a digital asset, which has never been done before in federal law. We had to do a lot of other things that are not simply cut and pasting existing law. So I made that my main priority as Chair of the Committee. That's why, that's how we passed FIT 21 last Congress, which got a two thirds vote in the House, represented bipartisan vote. But we separated the two, thinking we could get some broader support around a simple undertaking on stable coins. And then it would take longer on a more complex market structure bill. That was it. It was simply a political decision to take, separate these policies.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  That was it. Now this Congress has assumed what we did last Congress and what we spent the last five years working on. I think it's a mistake. I think we can do one crypto bill, have the president sign into law, which would provide the on-ramp stable coins to the crypto marketplace and also provide clarity of law. So we can't have a Gensler regime. We can't have a rogue regulator kill the digital asset ecosystem. And I think we can do that in one bill. I don't think it has to be two separate bills like the current legislative undertaking has.

• 11:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you see these bills coming out, like what are the big pushbacks? Like, is there anything that the critics actually are bringing up or using as a critique that you're like, you know what? That makes sense. I understand where they're coming from. Maybe I think they should overlook that and, you know, go ahead and support this. But it does feel like we're reaching a point now where I don't know anyone who's against stable coins with any sort of legit critique where you're like, you know what? That makes sense to me. But maybe there's politicians who, you know, actually do have concerns that we should be paying attention to.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  So there are a couple of concerns. But if you look at the markup, if you look at the committee working on legislation for market structure in the House, the whole debate was about Donald Trump. And this was about the Trump family and it was about nothing to do with the actual contents of the legislative, legislation before them, but about things that were second, other issues secondary to rule of law around crypto. And so it was the fact that the bill doesn't deal with congressional ethics. I'm sorry, Senate, the Senate or House ethics don't apply to the president or the executive branch because they don't. But that's not what the Financial Services Committee or the Banking Committee

• 12:53Speaker 04

  does, or what a crypto bill does. We already have financial disclosure requirements on elected officials. So it became a fracas about that, not actually about the contents of the bill. But the deeper conversation that

• 13:09Speaker 04

  A number of my Democratic colleagues and some of my Republican colleagues have is around illicit finance. The idea that you're going to use digital assets for money laundering and to fund drugs, war, bad regimes like North Korea and Russia. And there is, there's a question you have to, that is a serious question you have to answer in this legislation. The way to answer that is to explain to them the actual workings of a blockchain. The dumbest place to launder value is on an open permissionless blockchain. The idea that, the idea that you and I would exchange some value, we're better off in a parking

• 13:54Speaker 04

  lot doing that with cash. And that is how it's done globally is through American dollars in suitcases of cash or bundles of cash. So they're saying, well, that's what happens on a blockchain. That is absolutely absurd if they understood what an open permissionless blockchain requires. It would show not only that you and I had an exchange, but it would show you and I exchanged this value in this second, not even the minute, but the second it would happen. And so the FBI, the CIA, they think blockchains are fabulous for, for actually following the bad guys and stopping bad guys. So, you know, you got to answer

• 14:37Speaker 04

  this question, but it's also a failure to understand the technology. Those are the two big debates and not a question of the, of the trade-offs that these, these bills are making between two agencies or the regulatory format around these two agencies.

• 14:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, as we kind of see those critiques, I think, get answered, the question then becomes, okay, we're going to get the stablecoin bill approved, we're going to get the market structure bill approved. Let's say we have some sort of foundation now where America says, hey, we are actually in on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. We want to be a leader here. What's next? And I think that there's two areas that people are really interested in. One is the intersection of cryptocurrency and artificial Intelligence and it feels like it's kind of a part of this whole automation world. Obviously, stablecoins play a big part there. But the part that I know that you've been spending a lot of time on is tokenization. And you hear everyone from Larry Fink to the crazy crypto person on Twitter. Everyone is talking about the fact that they want to do tokenization.

• 15:35Anthony Pompliano?

  You are the vice chair, I think of the advisory council at ONDO, which is a big part of this. But before we talk about ONDO, let's talk about tokenization in general. And where you see this kind of playing into it in terms of we get the foundation from a regulatory standpoint and from a kind of political structure standpoint. Okay, how does this play out in your eyes over the next decade or so?

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Well, so tokenization, the idea that we're going to take real world assets and put them on chain has been discussed at a high level. But the way you do that is a very important, very important conversation. Well, let's talk about the most readily available assets and how you could easily put them on a new technology and trade them there. So the treasury's market is the largest market in the world, as well as the broader securities marketplace, stock ownership. Those are the first two avenues to put on-chain and have global 24/7, 365 trading of these assets.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  And there are a number of companies that are doing this, a number of large existing TradFi organizations and a lot of new technologists that are doing as well. And so I think this is the bleeding edge of crypto adoption. I think this is, this requires not a mindset shift for Wall Street and Wall Street traders or the global demand for the US dollar. But playing on that, this is a faster, better, cheaper way to trade. And so the adoption here is a software update, not a mindset shift for these markets. So companies like ONDO are bringing the treasury's market on-chain and giving global availability to non-US

• 17:29Speaker 04

  Citizens to the Treasury's market for the first time in a regulated, smart way. And so I think this is a, you know, a type of company to, a type of organization to look at. Because this is, this is about the first wave of crypto adoption among traditional players in finance.

• 17:50Anthony Pompliano?

  As this plays out, where are the areas where you think politicians can be helpful to the industry? Right? You know, I think a lot of times we look at and say, hey, the technologists, they got to go build this stuff. The financiers, they got to fund it. But it does feel like when you are playing in regulated markets, especially things that have this idea of kind of furthering, you know, America's economic independence and superiority, politicians do play a big part here.

• 18:13Speaker 04

  They do. And I think the, the main priority, what we could get over the next six months out of Washington. The number one thing we need is law. What we don't want for crypto is the, is to get out of this period where crypto is a high priority for, for this president, this administration and Washington elected officials and not actually have clarity under law. Which means that regardless of the next election, crypto will be here to stay in the U and I, in the United States. It obviously didn't go away, even though we had a bad administration that was anti-crypto. The adoption just happened overseas and the United States and United States citizens were left behind because of that.

• 18:55Speaker 04

  We need to be at the leading edge of technology and to get clarity of law is how we do this. When you talked about the merger of AI and crypto, I think with AI, identity is such a huge problem, huge challenge that, that we're wrestling with as a society. Crypto is the answer for proof of, proof of human. It's, it's actually proof of identity that can merge very nicely with, with the challenges of identity in an AI world. So we need to make sure that there's clarity of law in the, in the short run. In the long run, we're going to have regulatory clarity from these, these appointed officials that you, you mentioned. That President Trump appointed to run these agencies.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  That's going to more deeply embed these products across existing players and the leaders that have been driving digital adoption of crypto.

• 19:50Anthony Pompliano?

  How does decentralization start to change some of the lawmakers' kind of participation? And one of the things I always used to think about and talk to folks is jaywalking in New York City is technically illegal. Everyone does it because there's no enforcement, right? If you think about some of these rules, it is very clear that maybe a centralized exchange needs to file certain paperwork and there is punishment or consequences if they don't do that. When you all of a sudden have a decentralized exchange, there's no paperwork that can be filed, but also who do you punish? Do you go to the developer? Do you go to the technology? And these are, you know, kind of big, grand questions that I think everyone is struggling with and we may not have good answers yet, but specifically around real world assets

• 20:34Anthony Pompliano?

  and tokenization, that is to me, the biggest intersection between crypto and like the regulated financial world. And so how has politicians or lawmakers thought through some of these aspects of like decentralization and changing, you know, maybe the way that you actually create laws or that the way that the laws can actually be enforced because of that decentralization?

• 20:54Speaker 04

  Well, that question is like asking, you know, whether or not you're going to have cars pick you up via the internet in 1995. It would be like talking about the financial structures of the 1980s when we're passing the Securities Exchange Act, the Securities Act and the Securities Exchange Act in 1933 and 34. So this is really over the horizon thinking. It's great questions, but lawmakers are wrestling with the here and now, not, not these, these, these sort of the future environment, much less like going back to 1996, the Telecom Act of 1996 revolutionized the internet, but no one predicted mass adoption of the consumer

• 21:39Speaker 04

  internet like we've experienced in our, in our lifetime. So I think, I think we're, I'm much more optimistic about

• 21:49Speaker 04

  The benefits of decentralization than any of the negative consequences to society. We can wrestle, we can have like serious debates about AI and the consequences on society. But decentralization will bring down the cost of exchanging value. And in aligning that with words, speech, in a way that I don't think we can fully, fully understand. And I think crypto will be deeply embedded into the internet, will be deeply embedded into finance. Not 15 years in the future, 20 years in the future, but within five years in ways that we can't even contemplate today.

• 22:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Gemini. Are you interested in effortlessly growing your Bitcoin portfolio? I sure am. So good news. Gemini designed a product just for this. Meet the Bitcoin credit card powered by Gemini, which offers instant Bitcoin rewards on every purchase. This Mastercard World Elite product has no annual fee and no exchange fees to acquire your Bitcoin rewards. It's that simple. The magic of the card doesn't stop at the rewards. The card is sleek metal design that comes in rose gold, silver, black, and the new limited edition Bitcoin orange. Sign up today to earn a $200 Bitcoin bonus to jumpstart your Bitcoin portfolio. Whenever you spend $3,000 in the first 90 days. Obviously, terms apply. Go to Gemini.com/card for more details.

• 23:15Anthony Pompliano?

  That's Gemini.com/card. Go check them out today. It's no secret that Bitcoin ETFs have taken Wall Street by storm. With over $35 billion in assets in just one year, it's become the most successful ETF launch in history. My partner Bitwise is the first and only Bitcoin ETF provider to openly publish its Bitcoin wallet addresses, allowing anyone to verify the fund's holdings. I believe this level of transparency is exactly the kind of innovation that only crypto makes possible. Bitwise is also the only ETF issuer that is a crypto specialist asset manager, meaning their team solely focuses on Bitcoin and they have the research, education, and support to help investors navigate the space with confidence. All of that is great, but what I love most about Bitwise is probably their commitment. To developers.

• 24:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitwise donates 10% of their ETF's profits to Bitcoin open source developers. Bitcoin developers are the unsung heroes, working tirelessly to maintain, improve, and innovate the blockchain. Their efforts ensure that Bitcoin remains true to its promise as a decentralized system that is built to last. Go to bitwisePOMP.com to learn more about their ETF and other services. Once again, that's bitwisePOMP.com. BitwiseP-O-M-P.com. As always, remember investing is risky and carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before you invest. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin IRA. Are you a crypto investor with a retirement account but don't have any crypto in your retirement account? Then listen up, this is for you.

• 24:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin IRA is revolutionizing the way Americans save for retirement by helping smart investors diversify their savings with access to over 75 cryptocurrencies. With world-class customer service, military-grade encryption, and a vertically-integrated licensed trust company, it's no wonder more than 200,000 Americans trust Bitcoin IRA to secure their financial future. Getting started is quick and easy. It takes just three minutes to open an account. Once you're set up, their team of IRA specialists will reach out to guide you through every step of the process. Whether you're transferring an IRA from a legacy bank, rolling over an old 401K, or starting fresh with new contribution, the Bitcoin IRA team is here to help you get access to real crypto in your retirement account. And here's the best part, as a listener to this podcast, you can earn up to $500 in

• 25:29Anthony Pompliano?

  rewards when you add funds to your account. That's right, search for Bitcoin IRA in the App Store or visit bitcoinira.com/pomp to join 200,000 Americans on their journey to upgrade their retirement. Bitcoinira.com/pomp to upgrade today and you can earn up to $500 in rewards when you add funds to your account.

• 25:53Anthony Pompliano?

  It is pretty surprising at how fast this moves. Bitcoin is only 15 years old. And we talked earlier about how long you all have been working on some of these bills. Right? And so as you're trying to work through the rules, the technology is just rapidly appreciating and kind of value to people. How do lawmakers look at who the players are? That's always been fascinating to me, right? 15 years ago, it was a bunch of crazy people on the internet. Then it was kind of like, okay, maybe a little bit more mainstream, but still it was the internet and kind of individuals. Now you have the biggest financial institutions in the world. You have other governments that are participating in this industry, whether it's Bitcoin, some sort of altcoin thing, or even tokenization. And so does that change any of the lawmaking process?

• 26:36Speaker 04

  It does. You gotta build credibility. This is a big challenge for technologists generally on coming to DC. You gotta do the reps. To build credibility, you gotta do the reps. In order to have a meaningful relationship and trust with lawmakers, you have to have you have to have connectivity with them. And so crypto's had a forceful engagement really over the last three years, but have been at it for a couple of congresses before that. That is that credibility has been built up in the system because of the reps showing

• 27:17Speaker 04

  up, engaging, educating, a lot of education has had to take place. And then finally, the industry said, well, this is an existential crisis. You basically have a regime in Washington that wanted to put crypto, the leading folks in crypto, the leading centralized exchanges, they wanted to put them effectively in jail. Right? And they said, okay, our back's against the wall. We're gonna go all in and we're gonna go all in because the elections, this election will determine whether or not we can do crypto in the United States. Thankfully, crypto won and crypto won with probably almost all Republicans and probably 30% of Democrats at this point.

• 28:02Speaker 04

  Thirty, thirty-five percent of Democrats are pro crypto in votes and proof. And so that tells me that the electorate is aligned with the industry and wants adoption and wants people to be, but wants their leaders to be pro crypto. That's really where the fire is, right? With the populist to engage here and to make sure they hold their elected officials accountable.

• 28:28Anthony Pompliano?

  What other advice do you have for some of these founders, technologists or builders? Well, I think, you know, you and I both have seen the pilgrimages that people are making to Washington. It feels like kind of Washington is now, you know, wants to talk about this, wants to meet these people.

• 28:42Speaker 04

  Open for business.

• 28:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What do you think are the do's and don'ts? Like, are there like, hey, I've seen it a million times. Here's the mistakes that people make, whether things they say, the way they dress, the way they act, the maybe the perspective they bring. And then also like, what are the things they shouldn't be doing that can, you know, you mentioned reps, but are there other things that really kind of build credibility?

• 29:03Speaker 04

  No, the reps matter, but what you want to do is come in and be the best version of yourself you could possibly be. That's really it. But you don't want to be something fake. Don't do that. Don't do that. I mean, no one likes fakers, especially even in Washington, which, you know, there are a lot of pretenders here. But they want, they want a sincere interaction. They want to see what we need to do now and they want to see the future. And I think there's a huge opportunity with folks in crypto to explain what the future looks like if we can unlock some, some key things in Washington. That is really a cool conversation when you, when you take people on that walk.

• 29:48Speaker 04

  And if you can come in and be a value add to their thinking, build credibility, show yourself to be smart, that, that matters. And, and I think focusing on that is rather than the, you know, than showing up and pretending to be something you're not. I think being, being yourself and being the best version of yourself and being an educator is key.

• 30:12Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a gentleman that I'm friends with who's basically a modern philosopher, also known as the driver for many of the athletes in New York City. And he recently said, you can go broke and get money again, but if you go fake, you can never be real again. And I think that's pretty, that's pretty fair, right?

• 30:28Speaker 04

  That is spot on. That is spot on. And that's what happens. Like you see this with elected officials, right? And then you prove them out to be a fake and they can never come back. They've destroyed themselves. I mean, this is, you know, you talk about this, but like the memes actually are a huge driver of public perception. And if you look right now, the spat between President Trump and Elon Musk has captivated, like the best stuff that I've seen sent to me on X and Instagram and all this stuff is AI-generated film about the breakup and the emotional nature of it. I mean, it really shows you how those

• 31:09Speaker 04

  two individuals have captivated the populace. And they're both very real, quite authentic, and larger than life. So, you know, these memes really do drive perception and fakers get sussed out pretty strongly these days.

• 31:27Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Let's talk about Ondo. They are really pushing, I think, the edge of innovation when it comes to this tokenization. They want to build kind of a Wall Street 2.0. You're an advisor to them. What are you interested in there? Or kind of how do you think about their place in this ecosystem?

• 31:41Speaker 04

  So when I left government, I wanted to affiliate with high-quality people doing really good work. And I wanted to be measured about my engagement with crypto. And I wanted to be engaged with people that were on the leading edge of where I thought the first wave of adoption would be. And that's the crew at Ondo. What they're doing is putting on chain, first the treasury's market, but they're going to keep adding securities and other real-world assets on chain. And to give adoption to, giving access to the world, to US-regulated

• 32:19Speaker 04

  markets is quite an undertaking, but something very interested, very interested in embracing. And so that's where we've seen adoption, where we've seen folks, you know, really interested in every move that has been made by this team at Ondo, so. Great to be bolted on to this team and really excited about what they're doing.

• 32:41Anthony Pompliano?

  What's interesting to me maybe about kind of their philosophy or their approach is I've seen a lot of these tokenization platforms and many of them are focused on the asset themselves. And there's some version of, I mean, take a stock, a treasury or whatever, put a wrapper around it and then I can just go put it on to these blockchains. But to me, it feels like Ondo is much more focused on the infrastructure itself. They want to kind of rebuild the pipes of which then these assets will sit on. And it's kind of like a vertically integrated type solution. How have you thought about, you know, do you have to re-haul all of the traditional financial system in order for this to work? Or do you think that there is some kind of middle ground where maybe there's some evolution of existing technologies plus these tokenized assets?

• 33:23Speaker 04

  So I think what you see with Ondo is they take a current regulatory approach, currently available rules, rules of the road, and they're taking a crypto native infrastructure, building out the crypto native infrastructure and merging those two. But without being crypto native, it's very hard. All you're doing is really adding a new expense to what is like Washington is doing, like, but New York is doing pretty well, right? The world, Wall Street is doing pretty well. So you've got to go soup to nuts with a crypto plumbing and pipes in order to build this, this infrastructure out, in order to get a real cost advantage

• 34:05Speaker 04

  and to actually have a global markets on this platform. So that's what makes it exciting. That the actual plumbing and the pipes, that's a lot of the boring stuff of finance, but really important to the user experience and the cost structure around it. And getting that right is what the Ondo crew is doing.

• 34:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you know, it's funny is I was talking to the team over there recently and we were joking about this whole like 24/7 trading and it's like a layup tweet. Anytime you want to get a little engaged, we just say like, hey, stock market's closed, Bitcoin's open, right? And there's like an entire generation of people who are like, that's crazy. And when you do unpack it though, you know, maybe there's a little bit of regulatory reasoning for it, but really it is. Uh, people just wanted to sleep, right? They wanted to shut, you know, the kind of hours of operations. So you're dealing with like legacy, you know, kind of a thought process. The systems can, I think we're seeing companies like Robin Hood and others kind of extend those hours in unique ways. But I don't know anyone who isn't like, hey, obviously the markets are going to be 24/7 at some point in the future.

• 35:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And so is crypto kind of like the Trojan horse? Like, do we need these new technologists to come in and kind of like assault Wall Street? And say, look, we're actually going to compete and by competing, that's going to lead to the innovation. The innovation leads to the better experience for the user.

• 35:21Speaker 04

  Right. That's, that's, that's basically what it is. You, you have to have innovators innovate and drag the rest of the industry into it. Once there's adoption, now, once there's adoption, all these existing players are going to start trying to, to fill in. So it's really about this first mover advantage you have to have and getting a deep substantive engagement and adoption. And that's kind of, that's kind of, that's going to go change the whole world and how, how we interact with, with the world of finance.

• 35:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, you're in a pretty unique spot, right? I think that you sit kind of at the intersection of three different things. You actually have the experience from Washington DC and your time as congressman, the House Financial Services Committee. You are an advisor to what I'll consider the stripes and the A16Zs and the ONDOs and like the, the kind of technology and crypto can kind of fit in there. But then also you are an advisor to Lazard and kind of traditional finance. And so, you know, you more so than most people, I think that I could talk with have an insight into how these three groups are all talking about it. How much do they agree on? Cause it does feel like we are now getting consensus to it. You know, it was all contrarian before, but now it does feel like the conversations maybe you're having on a day-to-day basis with groups from three different industries.

• 36:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe it's a lot more overlap than we would have thought there would have been, you know, maybe five years ago.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Well, they all agree now that it's here to stay and that was certainly not the case two years ago. Certainly not the case five years ago, but crypto is here to stay. It's, it's, it is not, it is not the bleeding edge of technology. It is a technology adopted today. Every, every business.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  Is looking at AI, every business is looking at crypto and wants to understand how it affects them. Every small bank to a large bank is looking at both those pieces of technology and how it affects their their platform and their profitability. It is affecting every industry in America. And those that are thinking about it deeply and in applying best principles to crypto adoption and AI adoption. Those are going to be the standout stock performance. It's gonna, that's gonna be the standout performance for the, for the coming years. And those that think it doesn't affect them, well, they're gonna find out it affects every industry across, across the world.

• 37:42Speaker 04

  And, and if you want to be, if you want to, you know, you're either behind and dead or you can, or you're ahead and you're going to be profitable and, and, and, you know, have a great decade ahead.

• 37:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe where we can wrap up is this is all really exciting. And I think that people know there is more to go. When you look at Bitcoin and kind of a broader cryptocurrency industry, what is your expectation for what happens over the next, you know, five or 10 years? And, and kind of what, what are the things that you're most excited about?

• 38:15Speaker 04

  Well, what I'm excited about is, is bringing down the cost of payments. The idea that we're going to link bits and bytes on the internet with some form of digitally native payments will change the economics of digital connectivity globally. And I think that's the most exciting thing. Unlocking these really high cost of payments that we, we experience to move money, to have financial interactions. I think you're gonna have this, a massive set of new economic opportunities open up for individuals and businesses of all sizes. You, you match that with AI and agentic AI, the world of commerce changes completely.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  And it's gonna be, it's gonna be really exciting to see what this looks like in the decade ahead. This is, this is not like the first generation of the internet. It is even, it's gonna be even wilder than the first generation of internet technology.

• 39:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. That is music to many, many people's ears and I tend to agree with you. So it's going to be a fun decade to kind of watch this all play out. Patrick, thank you so much for the time today. We'll definitely do this again in the future. Look forward to it. Thanks for having me.