#551: Hany Rashwan on Building Crypto Products

Hany Rashwan is the founder of crypto companies Amun AG and 21Shares AG. He previously founded social commerce company Ribbon and enterprise fintech company Payout. In this conversation, we discuss crypto indexing, US market vs European market, institutional interest, ESG bitcoin, 21 Shares’ AUM growth, and when countries will buy bitcoin. ======================= Revolut is a finance app in the US and UK, that say they're the simplest way to access crypto. Sign up today at Revolut.com/pomp and make 3 card transactions to get $15, which you can exchange for any tokens Revolut supports. As usual, when you move your money from fiat to crypto your capital is at risk. See T&C's for details. Revolut is a financial technology company. Banking services provided by Metropolitan Commercial Bank, Member FDIC. Cryptocurrency services provided directly by Paxos Trust Company, LLC. ======================= Cosmos is building the Internet of Blockchains, marking a new era of interoperability, scalability, and usability. The free flow of assets and data between blockchains with bridges to Ethereum and Bitcoin will unleash the potential of DeFi, NFTs, and much more. Dive into Cosmos at cosmos.network/pomp ======================= Remote makes it easy for companies of all sizes to employ global full-time employees and contractors. We take care of international payroll, benefits, taxes and local compliance, so you can focus on growing your business. Learn more about Remote and their new Remote for Startups program at http://www.remote.com.

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Hani Rashwan is the co-founder of crypto companies Amun and 21Shares. He previously founded social commerce company Ribbit, an enterprise fintech company PayOut. In this conversation, we discuss crypto indexing, US market versus the European market, institutional interest, ESG Bitcoin, 21Shares AUM growth, and when countries will buy Bitcoin. I really enjoyed this conversation with Hani, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Revolut.

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Back to basics for a second, that's why I've partnered with Revolut. They're a finance app in the United States and the UK that say they're the simplest way to access crypto. They're putting their money where their mouth is. You can sign up and make three card transactions and you'll get $15. That's right, $15. When can you get 15 bucks and what can you do with it? Well, you can exchange it for Bitcoin or any of the other tokens Revolut supports. Yep, they are crypto-enabled. These guys have made it easier to get some skin in the game. And as usual, when you move your money from fiat to crypto, your capital is at risk. You can sign up now through revolut.com/pomp to get that reward. Again, revolut.com/pomp,

• 1:25Anthony Pompliano?

  and you can put them to the test. Revolut.com/pomp. See their terms and conditions for details. Revolut.com/pomp. Next up is Cosmos. They're building the internet of blockchains, making a new era of interoperability, scalability, and usability. The free flow of assets and data between blockchains with bridges to Ethereum and Bitcoin will unleash the potential of DeFi, NFTs, and much, much more. You can dive into Cosmos at cosmos.network/pomp. Again, cosmos.network/pomp. The internet of blockchains, making a new era of interoperability, scalability, and usability, including bridges to Bitcoin. Go to cosmos.network.

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Slash Pomp. All right, let's get this episode with Honey. I hope you enjoy this one.

• 2:15Speaker 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.

• 2:38Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Honey here with me. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:43Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. What is going on in the world of institutional adoption of crypto in public markets? I feel like you are the, maybe the world's expert on all of this. What's happening?

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we're based in Europe, so I can talk a lot about institutional adoption there. That's where our products are registered, listed. That's where they get sold. We have seen a lot of demand primarily from fund managers, independent asset managers, family offices, private banks. It's no longer just dipping their toes in. We see people talking about allocating 10, 20, 30 million dollars across a number of different strategies. Bitcoin is sometimes the gateway into all of this. Sometimes it's not. And so we've had people come in on smart contracts. We've had some people come in more recently with

• 3:37Speaker 02

  the Coinbase news on Binance and starting to see, well, the exchanges are actually printing cash. They're making real revenues. You can look at them as defensible businesses with moats and all of that. And a bunch of people have come in and wanted to invest in those kinds of things. And so I think in terms of pension funds, insurance companies, like really big institutional guys, they're not in yet. And it will be a while. We've had some conversations. They're, they're interested, but they're very slow moving and it's, it's going to be, I think, a long time before they're really in. But yeah, asset managers, private banks, family offices, high net worth are all more than dipping their toes in.

• 4:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk about the business that you have, because you basically have kind of two sides of the business. And I should say upfront, I'm an investor, so I'm a big fan and obviously very long. One is Amun and the other is 21Shares. What is the difference between those two?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  It's very simple. So we do ETPs, ETFs under 21 shares and we do tokens under a moon.

• 4:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And when you say ETPs, ETFs, I think most people know what an ETF is. What is an ETP?

• 4:48Speaker 02

  An ETP is basically what the Swiss call an exchange traded commodity and it is, it is what the Swiss specifically call it. Sometimes you go across the border in Germany and suddenly they want to call it an ETN or sometimes you go elsewhere and they want to call it an ETC. In Europe, as opposed to the United States, you cannot do an ETF on a single asset. ETFs have to, in order for them to be what's called USITs compliant, they have to have a diversity requirement. And you have to have a number of elements in there. So you could do an index as an ETF, but you can't do a single asset. And so in Europe, not even any of the commodities, silver, gold, et cetera, are done as ETFs. So it's impossible to do one there.

• 5:29Anthony Pompliano?

  On the 21 share side, talk through like just some of the products, right? So you have a Bitcoin ETP.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:35Anthony Pompliano?

  You have a ETH ETP.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:38Anthony Pompliano?

  What are some of the other assets?

• 5:40Speaker 02

  So we have 14 total products listed on the Swiss, German and Austrian stock exchanges. You can buy them using dollars, francs, pounds or euros. Bitcoin and Ethereum are two very obviously popular products. The other 12 products include a bunch of single assets, some of which you can only purchase through our company like Polkadot, which isn't available on a lot of exchanges, including Coinbase in Europe or Coinbase globally, actually. So we have a Polkadot ETP, we have a Binance ETP. We have a Tezos income generating staking ETP, stakes on your behalf, returns to you the dividends.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  And in addition to that, I think we have Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, we just released Stellar and Cardano last week. We also have the world's only indexes. So we have four indexes. One made by us, three made by independent third parties, including the American company Bitwise, Signum and Bitcoin Swiss. And we also have the world's only listed Bitcoin short. So you can buy a product to hedge or make a bet on the negative price action of Bitcoin just as easily as buying a share.

• 6:51Anthony Pompliano?

  So the 21 share side of the business, like how big is that from like an AUM standpoint?

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so things have escalated, I think, since we last chatted. We were doing, I would say probably 20 million when we last chatted. We were 27 million about a year ago. We're now at $2 billion in total AUM. And if you look at the price movement in the last year, a lot of that isn't just the price increasing. A lot of that is bigger checks from family offices, private banks, and a lot of retail interest in Europe as well.

• 7:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So $2 billion in assets across those 14 products?

• 7:25Speaker 02

  In the last 12 months, yeah.

• 7:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Now, when you go and you look at the AUM side, you said that you do tokens. Explain the difference between the tokens and the ETPs or ETFs.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Sure. So ETPs, ETFs are very regulated financial products. They're structured as securities. So in many ways, we take crypto and we securitize it in order for institutional and non-technical users to feel comfortable making a bet on the asset class. Tokens are on the exact opposite end of that. They're not securities. And they're listed in predominantly today ERC20 format. But we will soon list them in other formats as well. So you can imagine a Binance Smart Chain token, for example, or something built on another platform. For us, we just want to provide products to access the crypto ecosystem to users.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  And what we've found is sometimes it's significantly easier for certain populations to buy tokens. And for certain strategies as well, sometimes they're better in token form. And so whatever it is we can do on the token side, we'll issue it there. Whatever it is we can do on the ETP side, we'll do that. And there are sometimes overlaps. So we have both a BTC short token as well as a Bitcoin short ETP. And that's fine.

• 8:45Anthony Pompliano?

  How big is the? A moon side like and what is the interest you're seeing there?

• 8:49Speaker 02

  So the moon side is unreleased. So we're about to launch the first four tokens in about a month time. So we're launching with with a pretty cool partner. I haven't announced that yet publicly, but but you'll see it and it'll be cool. And we're launching, we're going to have a plan of launching both.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  What are what we're calling autopilot tokens? So they will go, you buy a single ERC 20 token, and then it on your behalf goes and generates yield optimizing rewards in some theme. So we're going to do that with liquidity mining, and we're going to do that with lending. So if you want to optimize all the DeFi lending protocols, just buy this token, and it will optimize that programmatically, airdrop you the rewards on a on a daily basis, on a regular basis. We're also going to launch a number of indexes. So if you would like to bet on the entire DeFi ecosystem, that's going to be the first product. We're also going to launch a few more interesting strategies there.

• 9:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So take like a DeFi index token. How do you determine what goes in, what doesn't go in? Is there rebalancing? Like, just walk through the kind of the mechanisms of how one of these tokens would work, where you're essentially buying like an index exposure, but you're doing it in token form?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so

• 10:08Speaker 02

  we take a look at a lot of things. In DeFi, we take a look at market cap and total value locked. We have certain tokens that we allow in. So we have the, you know, a committee that takes a look at this, makes sure that we respect the teams, we know the teams, we know who's behind them, we like the vision, we think this is worthy of inclusion. And that benefit is a little bit subjective, just whether or not it is eligible to even be considered. But then after that, we take, we take a hard look quantitatively at what the ecosystem looks like, how it, how it functions, how it's growing, and then we will do the weights there. Rebalances regularly. I think the entire point is that a lot of people believe in DeFi as a concept.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  They think it's going places, that they think it's really quite innovative and interesting, and they would like to invest in it, but maybe not necessarily have the time to dive into the specifics. It's sort of like betting on, I don't know, the Brazilian economy by buying a Brazilian index fund.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  And what we want to do is, we want to do that on these themes, so DeFi being the first one, but we'll also start thinking more about other themes as well as more momentum-driven things. So it's sometimes really, really difficult to see what is up and coming. We can programmatically do that, which should theoretically have, give you easier access to the new things that people don't necessarily know will be big yet. And that, that will be another way of, again, buying a single token, leaving it, setting it and forgetting it, and then it just does work on your behalf programmatically.

• 11:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What about actively managed tokens, right? So what I mean by that is, obviously, we've seen people in the traditional world have a lot of success by raising ETF that's actively managed. Can you do that in the kind of crypto token world, or is that not yet possible?

• 12:05Speaker 02

  I mean, you can, you can do whatever you want. I think depending on the jurisdiction, sometimes there are regulatory issues with active management. As a firm, we, we sort of decided very, very early on that we're not really interested in active management. We're not interested in endorsing any specific product. On the ETP side, all we look for is whether it's investable or not. Nothing more. It's not an endorsement. And on, on the token side, our committees there are going to do something similar, where, again, we're, we're going to try and verify that these aren't scams, but beyond that, it's not an endorsement. What we believe our company should be doing is being a very neutral picks and shovels

• 12:50Speaker 02

  business, right? We want to give you the building blocks, the tools, from which you can then go and using your ideas, your thoughts.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Go about and invest or build out your strategy in some way that is professional, institutional grade, has the safeties, you're not going to get robbed, the fees are low, et cetera, et cetera. But we're not going to jump in it and say, we're gonna pick the winners or endorse this or endorse that.

• 13:20Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about in the ETF, ETP side, right, on the 21 shares, is the same thing true there as well in terms of active management and just saying, hey, whether it's a token or an actual fund, we're not going to have to active manage ourselves and we're also not going to endorse anyone?

• 13:36Speaker 02

  So 100%. There are ways of doing active management ETFs and ETPs. Obviously, there are a couple of popular ones this year that have come out and everyone is talking to them. I think it's important to realize that active management is really, really hard. It's sort of like venture capital. We know the top winners and they do well, but the industry overall is oftentimes not having great returns. Active management's really, really difficult. And I would say that philosophically as a company, again, we're not really interested in active management. We're not interested in picking stocks or we don't think we are smart enough to do that. We just want to build the tools from

• 14:20Speaker 02

  which others can then use that. And so in the same way, we don't endorse any specific product. We believe that it's investable. We don't think it's a scam. We believe the teams behind the products that we are launching, believe in a vision, believe in a mission, are working towards it in a professional way. And beyond that, we don't do much else. We don't do small cap stuff on the ETP side. And so it has to be above a certain threshold that moves constantly, but guarantees as well that especially on the ETP side, you're not investing in like brand new things. They've matured a little bit. They've shown some staying power. And then we give you easier access to them.

• 15:02Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the people who appears to be smart enough to do active management is Kathy Wood. I know that you've done a bunch of stuff with her, including she's now personally invested in the business and she's joined the board of directors. Maybe talk a little bit just about her involvement in the business and kind of how this all came together.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Sure. So.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  We've always been huge fans of Kathy. I mean, if you think about the business and 21Shares being the first thing we did. She's an ETF issuer on the 21Shares side and Kathy's pretty big in the ETF world. Like before she hit the mainstream and was this huge figure that everyone knows now, she was still very, very, very much a big deal within the ETF world. So my co-founder ran into her at one of these exclusive ETF product structurists conference. They hit it off. We developed a relationship, chatted for a year or so. And then there came a point where we wanted to have an independent director on our board.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  And so Kathy ended up doing that and joining the board as well as more recently, she also became an investor in the company. And so, super, super excited about that. Besides all of the things that we hear about on the Bitcoin and crypto side, like she started investing in Bitcoin in 2015 when it was $250, right? I think people really under value how big of a deal that is and how difficult it was to do that at the time, especially for an institutional fund manager on Wall Street.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  But besides that, what she's doing on genomics, what she's doing with Tesla, what she's doing with all of the other products, this space exploration ETF that she just came out with, it's really, really innovative and we're huge, huge fans of the shop. And we wanted to, you know, gather some knowledge on that. One of the things that is really important and near and dear to our hearts is research. And so we believe really strongly that we should build a brand that is trusted and we should educate everybody. If you think about, the internet was created in 1983. It took a while for people to fully understand.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Maybe a decade later, then the boom and bust, then web 2.0. Then now we're starting to see the rewards. This is a generational thing. And it's, as John Oliver once said, crypto is everything you... Crypto is everything people don't know about finance and economics, combined with everything they don't know about computer science and cryptography. And that Venn diagram is tough. And so we seek to elucidate all of that. And we seek to publish very deep research, as well as very casual research. We do it in five languages now. We do it in Arabic, English, French, German, and Italian. And in addition to that, we do podcasts.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  We print a quarterly magazine for institutional investors. It's awesome. It looks great. We should probably charge for it, but we give it away for free now. And for that kind of philosophy to then run into Cathy, where ARC is an acronym. I think it stands for active research knowledge. Most people don't realize that, but ARC is all about research driving these decisions. And Cathy's background as an equity research analyst had a lot to do with, honestly, her big bets and her vision and how she's built the firm. So we also really overlapped there. And over the years, we've stolen a lot of how she's done research and that kind of thing.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  And so it was very nice to start working together.

• 19:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think makes her so great? Is it the research and just the constant, like, wanting to learn?

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's the...

• 19:11Speaker 02

  When you do research, it's scientific. It's not personal. It's not biased. There's not a huge selfish personality behind it. It's not egotistical. It's very fair, logical, scientific. And as a result, when you make big bets in that direction, then it's not personal and you reap the rewards. And I think a lot of people... People appreciate that. Wall Street is full of personalities that, you know, will come on TV and scream or have a certain or scream on Twitter or, you know, have a certain sort of reputation. Where that sometimes is removed from how their firms are doing or what their investment strategies are, et cetera.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  And on her, the first thing she did was say that research should be open. All of these investment banks are super closed. They're super private. They're charging so much for this. We shouldn't do that. We should have very strong theses that we really fundamentally believe in, and then we should share them with the world. And so you can go and see, you know, an Excel spreadsheet of how they value Tesla. And all of that broken down. And I think people really, really appreciate that. And then when you're right once, they appreciate it more. And then when you're right 17 times, then maybe you're on to something.

• 20:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. When you think about the operation that you have going in Europe, a lot of the stuff that you have is not available in the United States today. That'll be changed in the future. Talk a little bit just about the difference that you see in the institutional investors and the family offices between Europe and the US. Are there material differences that you can identify? Or do you feel like an institutional investor is an institutional investor? And so that there's really not that much to kind of call out there?

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, they have the same, no, they have the same characteristics. Oftentimes, the family office staff is recruited from, from the same, I guess, cut from the same cloth wherever you go. The interesting thing about Europe actually versus the United States and family offices, if I recall correctly, the average family office in the US is much smaller. Like, I think in America, people will set up family offices with 100 or 200 million of liquid assets. Whereas in Europe, the average to start is more like 500 million. And so you get sometimes the average, the median that you're speaking to is a larger organization.

• 21:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And do you think that that's like a cultural thing? Is that a egotistical thing in the United States of like, people want to say they have a family office? Like, what drives that?

• 21:47Speaker 02

  I mean, as

• 21:50Speaker 02

  As an American, I feel like it's a good spirit of I'm ready. I got this. I'll grow. I feel confident about this. Who says that the limit for me to have this is 500? I think it's 100. I can do it. And I think there's a good spirit of Americanism actually in that. I appreciate it.

• 22:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, it's just interesting that that's something that you notice, right? Is the size of the family offices are very different on the two different geographies.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Well, it's sort of like startups, right? One way of looking at it, and a lot of people, I think, make this mistake and do it is like, I'm not ready yet to do a startup. I still need to go and have 10 years of work experience. And I need to also maybe get some experience on the investment side. And then, you know, you only want to start a startup when you're super well qualified to do one. And I think I would argue as a person that did his first company when he was 19, very rightly so, America will reward people that go out and try. And you can try and fail, and failure is much more accepted in America than it is in Europe. And as a result, I think people take bigger bets. Which is why, again, it's the median, like the minimum is different in Europe.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  But obviously, the wealth is much, much, much, much greater in the US.

• 23:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, when you talk to regulators, kind of on different geographies, is there a change in tone or interest? Or kind of receptiveness to this stuff as we've seen, one, prices go up? But also, two, various institutions kind of over the last six to eight months, nine months, kind of coming to the market and not only coming to the market, but actually be public about their participation?

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so talking about regulators is a tricky subject. And I can't talk about any specific ones. And, you know, before I share some thoughts, you should know that we are speaking as of today with, I want to say 16 different regulators. So this does not apply to any, any specific one of them. In my experience, the response can be varied, but...

• 23:53Speaker 02

  At the end of the day, I haven't yet met a regulator that was personally motivated to bring something down or to champion something. Like, I don't think it's a crusade on any part. They're, in my humble experience, very technocratic folks, whose sole mandate, or sometimes their biggest mandate and their biggest concern, is protecting and investors. That's really it. All of that other stuff is a distraction. Like, price action, Bitcoin increasing in price, I don't know that that really impacts anything beyond, well, maybe

• 24:32Speaker 02

  the market is more streamlined now, such that the average retail investor won't lose everything in a scam by whales because the price action moved, you know, so hard, in one way or another. So I don't, I don't think regulators are motivated by the same things that certainly investors or entrepreneurs are. And it's actually, my, my, my personal opinion on this is that they tend to do a great job most of the time. We want to, we want them to move faster, but of course we do, because we, we move at a ridiculous speed as startup founders. But at the end of the day, they're very well-versed in this,

• 25:16Speaker 02

  sometimes more than certain people in the industry. And they're, they're, again, they're just trying to do their mandate of protecting the end investor. And if anything, regulation has gone pretty well. Like, there is a good trend going in most of the countries that we've interacted with. Certainly, Europe is, is far ahead of, of the competition, but there are certain regulators that are moving in Asia. We're going to announce in the next quarter or so, a Bitcoin ETF in, in Asia, in APAC. We're going to do one in the Middle East. And we're going to continue doubling down on, on Europe and other territories. And again, regulators are smart, receptive, and aren't being personally motivated in

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Sometimes you see some weird comments on there. It has nothing to do with their personal beliefs. They're very technocratic folks.

• 26:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's good to hear that, right? It's a positive for the industry and frankly, a bullish tailwind. When you think about recruiting, how has that changed? Is it now that everybody that works on Wall Street?

• 26:19Speaker 02

  That's an interesting subject, yeah.

• 26:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Or institutional investors like, hey, I got to quit my job and I want to go and work in this new industry. Is there still some lack of receptivity in terms of folks? Just like, what's changed there over the last maybe year or so?

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a lot of impact there from the price action.

• 26:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Are they mad that everyone's getting rich and they're not?

• 26:38Speaker 02

  I mean, I think a lot of people in the finance industry can speak very directly about how broken the finance industry is. And so a lot of the solutions, a lot of the problems that blockchain, Bitcoin, smart contracts, DeFi's want to solve, seek to solve.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  They're very intimately aware of those. And so that's, that's pretty easy. However, from a job security standpoint, up until recently, it was a higher hurdle. But I would say at this point, we have never had an easier time recruiting from the traditional industry. A lot of it is inbound in a way that is,

• 27:23Speaker 02

  you know, for someone that's been in crypto for a long time is really validating.

• 27:27Anthony Pompliano?

  How talented are the people? Are they, are these people that are coming in that are, you're like, wow, this is incredible talent? Or are these people who are like, you know, lower percentile performers in those other organizations and they want to come into crypto?

• 27:40Speaker 02

  No, no, no, the heads of departments, the heads of departments. We recently made an offer to, and she's accepted and she'll become our new head of sales to the head of a department at Euronext, which is a major stock exchange, right? Was, was leading a number of initiatives there. We've,

• 28:01Speaker 02

  We have been able to snag from traditional asset managers, traditional financial companies, country heads, like the person that was responsible for all of Southern Europe, the person that was responsible for all of Switzerland, all of Germany. And again, a lot of this is inbound. A lot of this is inbound. We have recruiters and obviously we try and seek other people. But what is surprising to me is how many people are just interested in this? How many people realize that the banking and financial system is broken? There is something wrong and maybe we're on to something and they want to be a part of it.

• 28:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What's so fascinating to me is not only are you getting an increase in total talent, right, coming inbound, but also the quality of talent is still very high. And what I wonder is how much of this kind of talent leakage, right, or brain drain from the Wall Street firms becomes a threat? And also they realize, hey, we're going to lose a ton of people if we don't start actually doing this as well. So there's kind of like an economic return that is an incentive to get into it. But also there's this element of like, literally if these people can't work on this stuff, they're going to leave and therefore we have to get into that business simply to retain our best talent.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would argue that it's a part of a longer tech impact on finance in general. Like before there was crypto, people were leaving for Silicon Valley to do other things. And so I think the financial industry has had an issue retaining top talent for quite some time. The top people in America at least go to Silicon Valley, in my experience. A lot of people in finance will then switch to Silicon Valley later. And so I think that's typically how it's going. I'm not sure that there's another strategy that the banks can have besides embracing this.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  And to their credit, and not every bank, there's some very bad.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  There's some very bad people that should understand innovation more in the financial world, but to their credit, there are several top institutions who have been quite early mavericks, and I think it will lead to very good things for them, right? A lot of the recent news coming out of, I don't know, Goldman Sachs, I think JP Morgan's doing some really interesting things. Some of the early market makers, like the traditional guys, Susquahanna and Jane Street and float traders, the fact that they were in crypto super, super early, like DRW owns Cumberland, that says a lot of great things about both of them. And so I think the early adopters and the people that made big moves are going to be rewarded really handsomely.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  And the one last thing I would say on this, and it's something that we in the industry should really embrace, it's completely fine to have skeptics that switch. This happened with JP Morgan and Jamie Dimon, right? And a lot of people attack JP Morgan, say, you know, you've been against it for so long, you're acting hypocritical. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with admitting you're wrong, and they should be fully embraced. I would love for, we're obsessed with Warren Buffett and Munger and what they think, I would love for them to switch their mind, and I will hug them with open arms and welcome them to the tribe, you know?

• 31:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence, right?

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 31:18Anthony Pompliano?

  That's fine. One of the things I'm really interested in, I feel like it's like literally like a trillion dollar question in the industry right now, is all these institutions that are coming in, how much do they resemble the retail investors that came before them versus they're a new breed of investor? And what I mean by that is, you know, do they really have strong hands or not? So one of the things is, look at Bitcoin as a market structure, right? We know that 60% of Bitcoin or so hasn't moved in the last 12 months. We know that more and more Bitcoin is coming off of exchanges on a daily basis, right? And so you basically have this majority of Bitcoin that is held by quote unquote "strong hands." People who, they're not trading, they're not looking to sell regardless of price volatility, up or down, like they just, they hold for a long period of time. Institutions come in, and frankly, there's like two different arguments, right?

• 32:03Anthony Pompliano?

  There's one argument that says, oh, they're big institutions, they don't care about the volatility, they're going to hold very strongly. Wrong, whether the price goes up or down, they're not going to go and just dump all the Bitcoin. They're doing this because they're in the industry, right? Like they had to go through a lot of pain and probably internal hurdles and bureaucracy to do it. So they're in. The other argument is Bitcoin drops 50% and the first people run into the door is Tesla and JP Morgan and Goldman and whoever. And they're just getting this thing off their balance sheet and like they actually are going to be the weakest hands in the room. Maybe the truth's somewhere in between there, but just how do you think about like institutions compared to what to some degree is almost like a non-economic actor? That has been the retail investors that have really kind of built this industry over the last decade or so.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think we should specify a little bit. The umbrella term of institutional investors is too broad. If we compare family offices and ultra-high net worth individuals who are, I would argue, the driving force of quote unquote institutional adoption in crypto today. They resemble a lot of retail in many ways. It's a much larger check, but it's sometimes driven by the same considerations. We're still not doing heavy investment committee meetings and the bureaucracy that's associated with it. Sometimes it can be driven by a single or a group, a single individual or a group.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  And largely the reasons that have attracted retail. And by the way, the reasons that have attracted early adopters like us, because I would argue we're not quite retail or institutional are the same.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  A lot of people are concerned with the amount of money printing going on. A lot of people are concerned with the inflation or lack thereof. A lot of people are concerned about geopolitical risk and family offices are usually based on an individual or a family. And they're equally concerned about the same things. And so I wouldn't worry too much about hands when it comes to ultra-high net worth and family offices. And in our experience, They're pretty, pretty damn strong hands. The price sometimes gyates in a wild and crazy fashion and they don't move. Oftentimes they buy more and you know, our, our first product was called H O D L for a reason.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  And I, I think that that really translates one to one for them. On the trading side, we've started seeing some trading firms go in. And they're very different. They're just a different breed. They're looking to make short-term profits and they're, and they're advertising it. Right. They're not shy about it. That is what they do. But I would say that anyone who makes an investment in crypto, a meaningful one. In my experience, at least talking to European family offices, they're planning on, on, on holding it in a similar, on a similar time horizon as a V C fund, as a being an LP in a V C fund, which you know, seven to 10 years minimum, that kind of thing.

• 35:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Outside of what I'll call institutional, uh, we have retail institutional, corporates and countries feel like the other two big thing that, you know, has happened.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 35:26Anthony Pompliano?

  I say that like, over the last like two, three years, everyone was so focused on the institutional investors. Almost forgot about corporations, right? Like there wasn't a lot of talk over the last two, three years about the corporations. And sure, there are some people who had very great foresight and they wrote about it, you know, years ago or something. But that was not a mainstream narrative.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Michael Saylor, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, a few others.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Mavericks.

• 35:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Have completely changed that narrative. And now it's like every day, uh, was it Mercado Libre in Latin America, a large publicly traded company in, in that region. They've now bought Bitcoin. You saw Metro Mile, which is a kind of insurance tech company recently came out and said, not only did they buy Bitcoin for the balance sheet, they're now going to accept Bitcoin for premium payments. They're also going to do claim payouts in Bitcoin if you want that. And so you can just start to see, okay, like here come the corporations.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And then obviously we have countries, the nefarious or kind of malicious actors that, uh, from a U S Western world perspective of Venezuela, Iran, North Korea. Etcetera. There's a lot of talk about things that they could potentially be doing with crypto, whether they're trying to mine it, buy it, hold it, whatever. But there's other countries that obviously are paying attention and they've publicly talked about it. What's kind of your read or experience with either the corporations or the countries? Are there things there that you've got like unique views on or things that people just don't understand yet?

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm very, very, very excited about this. I think it's going to be absolutely phenomenal. I think it's so early. Like, we're, we're happy that Elon and Jack and Michael are in.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  That's like three companies, right? There's 497 other companies just in that group of people that are absolutely not coming close to it at all. And, and, and it will be a while, but I think this is how it happens slowly, slowly, then all at once. And the country stuff you bring up is super interesting because I think we need to saturate the, sorry, the country stuff is super interesting. I think we need to saturate the companies a little bit more. It needs to be less of a huge statement for more companies to just have this as part of their normal portfolio composition, as part of their normal cash needs.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  And then countries will follow and they will follow first with sovereign wealth funds, which are more of private equity venture capital investments, even if they're very long term minded. And then at some point, central banks. We've had very good conversations with certain central bank governors.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  They're aware of it, not yet, but in the same way that central banks hold gold, they will hold Bitcoin one day. And I think countries will come, it will be a very big deal, but companies need to

• 38:19Speaker 02

  be a little bit more saturated first and it's super, super early for that. And by the way, if you're talking about like the big, big vision of Bitcoin, everyone's talking about it replacing gold. If Bitcoin becomes the new reserve currency, like the crazy estimates that, you know, we read about of 10 to 30 million dollars per coin, you need sovereign holders, you need corporate holders and you need that to be standardized. So maybe that's a 10 year thing.

• 38:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that Bill Gates said it best. We overestimate what we can do in one year. We underestimate what we can do in 10. But I do think that it's gonna happen much, much faster than that. And I think that Michael Saylor in the corporate world was like a perfect example. It almost feels like there's the first one to break the seal.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Then you get the early adopters, right? You still don't get mass adoption. So to your point, 497 companies still haven't done it, right? But one led to three.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  And it's no longer a big, as big a deal.

• 39:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, it normalizes a little bit. There's it's more of a conversation. There's literally CFOs and those other 497 companies are like, should we do this?

• 39:24Speaker 02

  They have to come up with a strategy.

• 39:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe we should go to a conference and learn about it, right? Like, there's all this that happens. Countries are gonna be the same way. And maybe it's one does it and then one other follows, right? And then it's just two and it's only two for a while. But I do feel like we're getting close to this point where a country that is doing it not to get around sanctions, but is doing it from a pure financial benefit standpoint is going to embrace it. And when that happens, I then think that there's a kind of a fast follower, two, three, four, five, however many. The bigger thing that I've got confidence in though, it's not gonna be the United States. It's not gonna be a major country, right? It's much easier for the smaller countries to go ahead and do this.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 40:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And to essentially say, listen, this is my opportunity, right? If this thing is gonna be real and this thing is gonna have global importance. Well, I can use speed to benefit in a more outsized way than those who have larger dollars, larger economies, you know, more kind of firepower from military standpoint, whatever. And so to me, it just is like kind of the mid level and down. Somebody in that bucket is gonna be able to kind of get it together and do it. We're recording this in May of 2021. By the end of this year, I think we'll see it.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  I completely see that. And to be fair, my 10-year horizon is when it becomes ubiquitous. I think it will take, I think it will take 10 years for it to become ubiquitous.

• 40:54Anthony Pompliano?

  How long does it take the US, you think?

• 40:57Speaker 02

  The US doesn't need to be first. That's the thing. That's the thing that, you know, people don't realize. It's really hard to turn an oil tanker, or I guess this is like a Carnival cruise ship.

• 41:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I was gonna say, yeah, oil tankers were much bigger.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  400 million people on it than it is to move a small sailboat that will just turn on a dime. And the US does not need to move fast. The US needs to make sure that not everything breaks. And that's, that's a different consideration entirely, which is fine, which is completely fine. I agree with you. I think someone will do it this year. It will be a small country. And there's an opportunity. There's a huge opportunity for a number of countries to go in. What happened with Bulgaria? Don't they have 200,000 Bitcoins? Did they sell those?

• 41:42Anthony Pompliano?

  They claim that they sold them.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  They sold them?

• 41:44Anthony Pompliano?

  They claim. Who knows? The US claims that they don't have any either anymore, right? Because they confiscated it, so they auctioned it off. Maybe. I don't know. Look, it's kind of like folks on Wall Street for a while. You just bought some just in case. We didn't tell anybody. And then all of a sudden, if it works, you're like, oh, I bought it back, you know, two years ago. I'll look at how smart I am. And if it didn't work, then you just don't tell anybody ever, right? And nobody knows. And so like, why take the reputation risk, or the, in this case, geopolitical risk, if you don't have to yet? It's like, my guess is that some of these countries are already holding it, right? It's just who's the first to come out and say it.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Because that's like another thing is if you separate out the action from the announcement, like the actions probably already happened in some of these countries.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  And it's going to be a, like a national security thing to not hold it, I think, in, in a few years' time. And don't know when, but at some point, it will be prudent to hold this. And you're starting to see some countries trying to regulate mining more. Like, more mining hash power should come here, or...

• 42:52Speaker 02

  You can only use locally mined Bitcoins.

• 42:55Anthony Pompliano?

  It's so.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  That's crazy, but that says something about the national security apparatus, thinking about this under the lens of national security. So from a sovereign central bank perspective, yeah, they'll, they'll hold it strategically. Forget economically, because I think countries are mostly driven by surviving versus thriving. And there, there's a, there's a subtle but important difference. And so if national security necessitates holding crypto, you're going to get a lot more holders than the economic opportunity.

• 43:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Agreed, but this whole idea of like, uh, special Bitcoin is all bullshit, in my opinion.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 43:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, green Bitcoin. Uh, my friend Kevin O'Leary, I keep giving him a hard time. He keeps talking about blood coin, right? Meaning like, you know, Bitcoin that's not, uh, um, mined with renewable energy. Uh, now you're getting all sorts of, uh, I think my buddy Marty Bent said, uh, virtue signaling Bitcoin.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  Mark Cuban only buys like freshly mined Bitcoin allegedly.

• 43:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Something, uh, locally mined Bitcoin, right? I mean, there's all these little things that people are trying to do.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Trying to create a Whole Foods for Bitcoin.

• 44:04Anthony Pompliano?

  It's all nonsense.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  This is organic.

• 44:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? There's 21 million Bitcoin. If I have Bitcoin, you have Bitcoin and literally we trade them.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And now I sell a Bitcoin, you have Bitcoin. It doesn't matter.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 44:14Anthony Pompliano?

  It's just like dollars, right? Imagine if somebody said, you know what? I'm only going to take dollars that are freshly planted from the Federal Reserve.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Right?

• 44:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Or I'm only going to get dollars that have, uh, been held by one person.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, technology's not there to do it, obviously. So you couldn't do it. Here, you could actually track some of this stuff, but I just think that it's ridiculous and it almost feels more like, uh, intellectual stimulation than any sort of actual real world, uh, applicability. What do you think?

• 44:39Speaker 02

  I feel like for certain people, it's just another excuse. Like, oh, I'm not investing in this because, um, renewable energy. And then you look at their stock portfolio and it's a bunch of coal powered companies and, you know, African mining, uh, based corporations.

• 44:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you want to know what I think somebody should do?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  What?

• 44:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm definitely going to get in trouble with Plina for saying this, but I'm going to say it anyways. So you know how

• 45:00Speaker 02

  It's okay, just another day, right?

• 45:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you know how the media loves to write these articles all about the Bitcoin miners? And how they consume so much power and like they're ruining the planet? I'm waiting for a Bitcoiner to write an article that says that the media, how many trees get cut down every year so they can print their newspapers and magazines? And they're ruining the environment, right? And kind of like, okay, hold on a second here. Like you fight fire with fire. Like you want to have these ridiculous, stupid articles? Like here come ours.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  I will take this back to our research team. I'm literally gonna run the numbers on this. You might see something soon.

• 45:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, think about it for a second.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  That's really interesting.

• 45:35Anthony Pompliano?

  We should shut down all of the newspapers and magazines because they cut down too many trees.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Like you're killing the environment.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're destroying the planet if you don't use a Kindle.

• 45:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like it's kind of crazy. Why do you guys still have this? So like it's almost to this degree of like, it's an absurd argument.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 45:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, and there's no scientific or mathematical, uh, like application that is used in this analysis. Like literally just like, look how much power they use. Let's compare it to countries. It's like, hold on a second.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  The electric grid is also really hard to explain and to understand. And so look at how much power they use.

• 46:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Says nothing. Yeah, let's do the dollar, right? Or, or how much electricity is used by the media organizations to just keep the lights on? So they can write articles.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And you start to do all this stuff and like, what you realize is like, look, by the way, I'm not here claiming that Bitcoin doesn't use energy, right? But I do think that the context is really, really important. And on top of that, the, you know, what is it? 75% renewable energy or what? Like all these little details get left out of the story. And so I think that that's like the world we're headed to is whether it's, hey, I have green Bitcoin or locally mined Bitcoin. Uh, or I was used on energy efficient Bitcoin or you know, whatever people come up with. It's all crazy.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  I do think though, that this year we'll probably start seeing some ESG Bitcoin.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  And people will

• 46:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think it trades at a different price?

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Maybe. Like, we're thinking about it.

• 47:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. We get a, we get a ton of requests from, um, so this is where I would differentiate between the two, right? I think there are certain people who are absolutely judged vehemently against it and are looking for an additional excuse. And then I think there are people who are constrained by their fund mandate or their own rules or their country's rules from investing. Like, a lot of, a lot of listed, um, products, um, in, in certain countries are unable to buy Bitcoin. One of, one of the reasons why, because of local regulations, just local regulations. One of the reasons why we've been successful is that we've come in and we've securitized it for fund managers whose mandates would otherwise preclude them from investing in physical crypto.

• 47:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Because they can invest in a fund, they can't buy Bitcoin directly.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so off of that, I would be a proponent of if, if you need an ESG, um, entry point because of certain fund requirements that you have in Geneva, that's okay. Let me figure out some clean energy mines, get you in that way, because you're ready to come in. Your rules just prohibit you from doing that. And I think we should differentiate between the two. Even though I agree with your bigger argument that over the long run, um, I think Bitcoin will be a huge, huge part of solving the climate crisis, not

• 48:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think it's not, I think right now it's probably the number one or one of the top R and D drivers of renewable energy in the world.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  In addition to that, um, carbon taxes, which are actually the solution, but no one is politically able to do it. Bitcoin will be able to put an economic, uh, component to the energy grid and to clean energy and to global warming in a way that nothing else will. So I think in the long run, I agree with you absolutely. And it will be clearer, uh, the more time, um, runs by, but in the short term,

• 49:05Speaker 02

  if I can do something to bring more people into the crypto ecosystem, let's do it.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  And by the, by the way, in a, in a, we have a product that does that already in a, in a different way. So we have a Swiss product. We have a product that is an index of Bitcoin and Ethereum that is in Swiss francs with Swiss custody, Swiss trading, Swiss everything, Swiss branding, two Swiss issuers. There's a certain set of people who will only want to invest in Swiss products. I don't know if you know this, but with gold ETFs, there are gold ETFs that are only Swiss gold, Swiss custodied gold, and they charge a premium for that. And people feel more comfortable doing that. We've launched that product. It has tens of millions of dollars in it.

• 49:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Does it trade at a premium?

• 49:54Speaker 02

  It does not trade at a premium. Maybe, maybe these are good ideas from POMP that we should incorporate.

• 49:59Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not saying to trade at a premium.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  It doesn't trade at a premium. It trades at the same price as, as everything else. But certainly these tens of millions of dollars that are in this product, it's just an index of Bitcoin and Ethereum, right? There are a lot of complementary products out there. I'm glad we brought them in somehow. And I would do the same thing with ESG. I'd do the same thing with a few other things.

• 50:19Anthony Pompliano?

  But I think it's different when you're saying, hey, I need a Swiss security. I need Swiss, you know, license. I need a Swiss exchange. I need a Swiss issuer or whatever. Those all things are true, right? There, you're not going to convince me that a Bitcoin is different depending on where it was mined.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  But you're not the one that's being convinced. What, what you will have is you have a fund manager who's bullish, who believes Bitcoin will replace gold, who believes all of that, and he wants it. And then his compliance department needs to tick the box on an ESG requirement.

• 50:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I would, but what I'm saying is,

• 50:59Speaker 02

  and I'm never going to talk to his compliance department. I'm not, I'm not having that conversation.

• 51:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What I'm saying though is it's a mirage, right? Because the Bitcoin is the same either way.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:06Anthony Pompliano?

  So what you're basically doing is, if you think of it from a first principles standpoint, you're literally making up a whole charade to simply be able to buy it, which, fine, okay, if you acknowledge that. What I'm saying, the difference is if you say, hey, I need a Swiss regulator, right, or a Swiss issuer, you go, it's either, it's true or false. Are they Swiss issuer, yes or no?

• 51:25Speaker 02

  I think it becomes, I guess that's where I disagree with it. I think it becomes, it's a mirage over the medium and long term, as some of this stuff becomes clear and plays out. In the short term, It's a valid concern for someone that is legally and by regulation required to show everything that they invest in and it's environmental output. And that's difficult to do if you're just buying Bitcoin on an Asian exchange.

• 51:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Completely agree that it's difficult to do all this stuff. What I'm saying, though, is that's a investor problem. That's not a Bitcoin problem.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  It's not a Bitcoin problem.

• 51:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Because if that was the case, no, but if that was the case, then they shouldn't hold dollars.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  I agree. I don't think it's a Bitcoin problem at all, but we should help those kinds of investors that want to come in, but can't due to some handcuffs here or there.

• 52:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Exchange rules.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  You should do both, both actively.

• 52:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that we can agree. What are you most excited about moving forward? Like next 12 months? What's the thing that you're like industry-wide, not necessarily for the company, because then you'll have to say things?

• 52:28Speaker 02

  No, we don't want me to say things.

• 52:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, can you come on my podcast and not talk?

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Of course, of course. I think I have been really, really, really surprised by what has been going on with DeFi. And I think we talked about it, actually, the last time I was here, very briefly, like, things are interesting there. Yeah, that has escalated to a point where Uniswap now, on certain days, does more volume than Coinbase.

• 52:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I think on an annualized basis, it's like a fourth of their

• 53:00Speaker 02

  It's ridiculous.

• 53:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, of their trading volume.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Sushi Swap came out of nowhere. Pancake Swap came out of nowhere. There's so much innovation.

• 53:06Anthony Pompliano?

  What is up with the names? What is up with the names?

• 53:09Speaker 02

  It's good.

• 53:09Anthony Pompliano?

  I like, I love it.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  Ethereum has more of a, you know, Rainbow Kittens meme vibe about projects. And that's

• 53:18Anthony Pompliano?

  It is what it is. That is the community.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  Whatever sticks.

• 53:21Anthony Pompliano?

  By the, by the way.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  We have to do research on Sushi Swap and explain that to people.

• 53:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, if I'm a huge believer that communities drive their culture.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And if the community wants something, not only are they going to create it, but like, who is anybody outside of the community to judge? Right? So like the naming conventions, also like, to me, I'm like, how do they think of Pancake Swap?

• 53:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:44Anthony Pompliano?

  But also, I'm like, by the way, is that, that's what they want? Awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Right? Like, it's great.

• 53:49Anthony Pompliano?

  We, I have yet to have somebody come in here and have a conversation about this stuff and not start laughing as we talk about the names, which is almost part of the fun, right?

• 53:57Speaker 02

  And if anything, it has infected the other part. And so Chef Nomi is the, you know, head of Sushi Swap. What's the CFO of Tesla's title again?

• 54:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  Right? Master of Coin?

• 54:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Master of Coin and Techno King of Tesla.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so I think it goes, it goes both ways. But what's going on in DeFi is really early and really, really exciting. I'm confused a little bit still about NFTs.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  I think that it's really exciting to see Bitcoin become so standardized. I, I, I think most people are starting to come around to the inevitable outcome of Bitcoin.

• 54:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I was gonna say, is it a foregone conclusion at this point?

• 54:37Speaker 02

  It's close. It's close.

• 54:39Anthony Pompliano?

  No one ever wants to say it, but like, I kind of feel like, all right.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  It's close. And I'm really excited about that. What are you excited about?

• 54:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Same stuff as always. Like, to me, it's a foregone conclusion. It's been for a while, but I think like really not like, you have congressmen and senators with laser eyes.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 54:59Speaker 02

  And mayors.

• 54:59Anthony Pompliano?

  You have mayors.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  We're sitting in Miami, right?

• 55:01Anthony Pompliano?

  You have, uh, people who work at some of the most conservative organizations in the United States that are all accepting this, using it, buying it, holding it. Like, it's not going away.

• 55:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And if it doesn't go away, the properties of the asset are going to continue to affect this like apex predator mechanism in the market that's going to continue to suck liquidity out of other assets. It's like, one of the things that I think nobody's really talking about is when Bitcoin flips gold, it's not happening at 10 trillion.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  No, no, not at all.

• 55:37Anthony Pompliano?

  It's happening at like 8 trillion.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And why? It's because Bitcoin is going to continue to grow, but also gold's market cap is going to contract. Like, gold is a dying asset, which sounds nuts to people. But what we are watching is we are watching a new asset that is digital slay, an analog asset. And some of it is causation, some of it's just pure correlation. But literally, as over the last six to eight months, Bitcoin has gone up 600%, gold is down.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. But you know why it's not inevitable yet?

• 56:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 56:12Speaker 02

  Bitcoin winning? Because I think it will be inevitable when you, as the manager of a treasury somewhere at a corporation, would have job risk of if you do not invest in crypto. Where you could be fired if you do not have a crypto allocation, where it's that obvious. And you would be-

• 56:30Anthony Pompliano?

  But I think that that's already like in the inevitability, like that's already going to happen.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  It's going to happen. It hasn't happened yet, which is why I'm saying I don't think, I don't think today it, that's why I said we're close. We're not quite there.

• 56:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, that's fair. Yeah. You want more, uh, you have more risk aversion than me.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  I want you to be more, yeah, if, if you have a risk of getting fired from your job, if you don't invest in crypto, that's when we've won.

• 56:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there another asset where people have that risk?

• 57:02Speaker 02

  I mean, I-

• 57:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Like if you don't hold public equities, I guess, like you're considered an idiot?

• 57:05Speaker 02

  If you're holding, if you're, if you're managing some portfolio or some treasury and you're not, yeah, if you're not holding normal equities, that's pretty strange. If you're not using some sort of hedging mechanism in a basic way, like maybe people will question you. And if you don't, if you have zero allocation to crypto, maybe, maybe then your sharp ratio is so wrong that clearly you don't know what you're talking about.

• 57:28Anthony Pompliano?

  You're not fulfilling your fiduciary duty.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Something, exactly.

• 57:31Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 57:34Speaker 02

  At Haney on Twitter is the best way.

• 57:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Did we talk about last time how you got that handle?

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Just very, very early Twitter user.

• 57:41Anthony Pompliano?

  You just went in and typed it in and were like, whoop, let's go.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  Foreign name, very early Twitter user. All right. Winning combination.

• 57:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, and then 21Shares and Amun?

• 57:48Speaker 02

  21Shares.com, A-M-U-N.com.

• 57:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Both dot coms?

• 57:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:53Anthony Pompliano?

  21Shares, nobody had?

• 57:54Speaker 02

  We, we're getting good names, right?

• 57:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. 21Shares, nobody had?

• 57:57Speaker 02

  21Shares, we had to buy.

• 57:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, is there a good story?

• 58:01Speaker 02

  No, no, we, we, we paid a really, uh,

• 58:06Speaker 02

  pretty low price.

• 58:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, low price.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  Pretty low price. I think it was a couple thousand bucks.

• 58:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, all right. That's fine. They should have, they should have taken a Bitcoin.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 58:13Anthony Pompliano?

  They'd be in better shape. All right, my friend. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. Always fun.