Zac Prince on BlockFi, Bitcoin, and GalaxyOne

Zac Prince is the Managing Director at Galaxy Digital and the co-founder and former CEO of BlockFi. In this conversation, we break down what really happened at BlockFi's collapse, the fraud behind FTX and Alameda that he witnessed firsthand, and the lessons he's applying to risk management today. We also discuss Galaxy One's banking, crypto, and yield products, and what the future of investing and AI-powered finance looks like. ======================= The views expressed by the speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Galaxy or its affiliates. Yield is variable and may change with 30 days’ notice. Galaxy Premium Yield is available only to U. S. accredited investors, is not a bank deposit, and is not FDIC insured. The note is unsecured and may result in loss of principal. Guaranteed by Galaxy Digital Holdings LP, a subsidiary of Galaxy Digital Inc. Staking involves risks, including validator downtime, slash, loss of rewards, and Galaxy cannot guarantee validator performance. ======================= Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! ======================= TOKEN2049 returns to Singapore on October 7–8 at Marina Bay Sands. The world's largest crypto event. 25,000 attendees, 300 speakers, 1,000 side events and the whole industry in one place for two days, into the F1 weekend. Get 10% off your ticket with code POMP10 at https://token2049.com/singapore ======================= Uphold is the easiest way to buy and sell crypto unlike any other platform allowing you to trade in just one step between any supported asset. Check them out at https://www.uphold.com/pomp/This video includes a paid sponsorship with Uphold. I’m compensated by Uphold for promoting its products and services and may receive commissions from referrals. Terms apply. Not available in all jurisdictions. Digital assets are risky and may result in the total loss of your capital. ======================= Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/pomp ======================= 0:00 - Intro1:05 - What really happened at BlockFi?8:09 - Celsius, Voyager collapse & the run on BlockFi10:01 - The FTX acquisition, Sam Bankman-Fried & discovering the fraud13:32 - Lessons applied to risk management at Galaxy16:08 - Silvergate, SVB & the "war on crypto"18:49 - Regulatory politics & the future of crypto policy22:10 - Rebuilding: what Zac learned post crypto war26:36 - What is Galaxy One? 41:43 - AI agents & the future of banking

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:26Speaker 01

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• 0:55Speaker 02

  The balance sheets that Alameda was sending to lenders, BlockFi included, were just false and that there were Slack messages between Sam and Caroline, where Caroline said, here's the balance sheet I'm about to send to BlockFi or another lender. And Sam would say, it doesn't look good. Give me other options. And she would create seven tabs on the spreadsheet, seven or eight tabs, all in kind of varying degrees of essentially lies. And then Sam would write back over Slack and he would pick the one that was like essentially the biggest lie.

• 1:28Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on, guys? Today we have a great conversation with Zach Prince. He's the managing director of Galaxy One. And in this conversation, we talk about what happened at BlockFi. What lessons did he learn? What happened to the industry during the war on crypto? What are the lessons that he took from BlockFi and other crypto banks? And is applying it today at Galaxy One? What do they do? How can they help you? What are the risks? And why does he think that the traditional financial system, merging with crypto, has so many opportunities that you're going to be interested in? This conversation covers a lot. I think it'll have a lot of insights for all of you. And I really hope you enjoy my latest conversation with Zach Prince. All right, Zach, the elephant in the room. What happened with BlockFi?

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Not even a hello? How you doing? Good to see you? No, I'm pumped to be here. It's great to see you. What happened at BlockFi? So if we just think about what caused BlockFi to end in tragedy the way that it did, there were three big moments. The first was the regulatory action in the summer of 2021, completely out of the blue, resulted in us having to turn off new signups from US customers for a period of time and a larger than we could have ever anticipated financial penalty of $100 million. Second, a few months after that concluded in early 2022, two of our largest competitors, Celsius and Voyager, went bankrupt. That prompted a, essentially a run on the bank,

• 2:48Speaker 02

  if you want to refer to BlockFi as a bank. About 85% of our customer assets on the platform were withdrawn. We withstood that, processed all the withdrawals, but the company wasn't in the best position at the time. Summer of 2022, crypto was in a bad spot. And we knew that we needed to either raise more capital or attach ourselves to a bigger company. And ultimately, the process that we ran concluded with us getting acquired by FTX. FTX, ultimately, you know, everybody knows how that ended. But, you know, Sam is in prison now. I was a victim witness at the trial for SBF. For technical reasons, we weren't officially part of FTX yet. We were still an independent company.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  They had an option to acquire us within a year, which they were planning on exercising. But we were still an independent company. So I stayed on as the CEO of BlockFi through the confirmation of our bankruptcy plan. Funds were ultimately, you know, all the funds that were available were ultimately distributed back to creditors. I think that process is fully wound down at this point in time. But it was a tragedy. I mean, we had, we delivered a ton of value for customers while, while everything was working and operationally working and learned a lot, you know? Learned a ton about what types of things I want to do next, business growth strategies that work and don't work, risks to avoid, pitfalls to avoid

• 4:17Speaker 02

  in terms of building a business in crypto or fintech more broadly. And wish it would have ended differently, but that's not, that's not the way the cookie crumbled ultimately.

• 4:27Anthony Pompliano?

  So I don't think people quite understand a couple of nuances that you mentioned there. In 2021, I think it was, if I remember in June or July of 2021, you guys got a letter from, I think it was the state of Kentucky, if my memory serves me right. And they essentially accused you of the interest-bearing accounts being some sort of like yield security.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Unregistered security.

• 4:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Unregistered security, okay. And when they did that, it just became this like every state that, you know, it's like, oh, that sounds like a great idea. Let me lob one in as well.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  It actually started in New Jersey. And then within a week or two, there were, I think, eight states that had essentially copied and pasted the order from New Jersey.

• 5:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so, you see, I got a bad memory.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Kentucky was one of them, so it's not that bad.

• 5:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, all right. As this happened, you shut off New Year acquisition in a lot of these places. That, it puts stress on a business because you're not growing, right? But it wasn't like, oh, we need the new customers to take their money and give it to old customers or anything like that. But then, the final outcome of a bunch of these regulatory actions slash with the federal regulators was this $100 million fine. And, you know, I had kind of a different perspective than other people because we were investors in the company or I had assets in the platform, et cetera. And when this was happening, I think that the thought process was like, other companies who had gone through this, their fines had been significantly smaller,

• 5:59Anthony Pompliano?

  you know, a couple million bucks, $10 million, something like that. But the $100 million was like a substantial amount of the capital on the company's balance sheet. And so you immediately go from really a position of strength on the balance sheet to immediately a position of weakness because of government action. People can debate good, bad, indifferent, but like that materially changes the position of that company based on that action, right?

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And there was, there is precedent for this with other fintech companies. If you look at companies like PayPal, who went public at a time before the money transmission licensing framework was finalized across all of the states as a, you know, internet-powered mover of funds. Lending Club in the online lending industry had a similar tussle with the SEC about whether letting consumers invest in loans through a website was a security or not. And in just about every case outside of crypto that you look at, the fine was not significant relative to the size of the company's balance sheet if it was a market leader in a new category valued at north of $1 billion like BlockFi was.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  The other thing I would highlight about that regulatory action is we, we were not a company that was trying to avoid regulation. BlockFi was quite the opposite. We had state-level licenses, federal-level licenses. We had been searching for a period of time to find a structure that worked for this functionality that we were providing of earning interest on crypto. And we were actually close. There's kind of two categories you can go in. You can go in banking regulations or securities regulations. We were close to something on the banking regulation side that ultimately blew up as a result of, you know, SEC or state securities regulators' actions. So we were kind of choked off from that path that we had been on from a regulatory perspective.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  The fine was larger than we expected. And you remember this very well, I'm sure. We were in the middle of a fundraising round, literally in between, all the docs have been signed and all the money has been wired. About half of $500 million had already been wired by investors. But ultimately, the regulatory action happened during that funding window. And, you know, investors understandably got cold feet. We ultimately restructured the round and gave everybody the option to not participate in the round if they didn't want to, which downsized the round dramatically.

• 8:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think you're being very kind. And we don't need to rehash names. But I think that there were some investors who had signed documents and reneged. They basically were like, hey, we don't want to be part of this. You can argue, I think, two sides. One is, there's new information, and so they want to change their mind. I think I come a little bit more from a school of thought of, if you sign that contract, you're kind of wiring the money regardless and, you know, get your hands dirty and try to fix it. Not everyone does it that way. But I definitely think that the regulatory action had an impact on the fundraiser. Now, I did not know, and this is the first time I'm hearing this, that 85% of the assets got withdrawn

• 9:09Anthony Pompliano?

  when Voyager and Celsius went down. That is a lot. If you said to me that there had been assets withdrawn, of course, but 85% is a huge number.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  At our peak at BlockFi, we had a little over $14 billion in client assets on the platform. So that was like roughly summer of '21 timing. By May of '22, when Celsius and Voyager collapsed, that had drifted from 14 down to about 12, $12 billion in client assets.

• 9:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Still a lot.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  In the, you know, first two weeks post Celsius and Voyager blowing up, we went from 14 to 2. Uh, in, in

• 9:46Anthony Pompliano?

  From twelve to two.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Four, yeah, sorry, twelve billion, twelve billion down to two billion.

• 9:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Um, and we processed, you know, every withdrawal during that timeframe.

• 9:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you get down to the two billion, you continue normal operations and then that's when, uh, the FTX stuff really kind of, uh, takes hold.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, so running up to May of 2022, we had switched to the company from growth mode to profitability mode. So the company was actually profitable for the first time it's his, in its history for a few months, leading up to May of 2022. Um, when the assets left the platform, uh, that took us from being profitable to not profitable anymore. We were making a lot less revenue. Um, we were still, uh, you know, solvent and, um, uh, had plenty of assets to continue operating as a going concern, but it was clear that on a six, 12, 18 month time horizon, somewhere along there, we were going to need to bring more capital into the business, uh, which kicked off a, a fundraising process, but

• 10:47Speaker 02

  also an M and A process in parallel with the fundraising process. And ultimately the conclusion there was that, um, the best opportunity we had was an acquisition by, uh, FTX.

• 10:58Anthony Pompliano?

  What was the conversation with Sam like?

• 11:01Speaker 02

  I talked to Sam, you know, we, um, BlockFi did a lot of business with their team. That was less Sam and I, uh, working directly with each other and more our institutional lending team and, uh, Alameda team within FTX. Um, I spoke with Sam two times before the, uh, the acquisition got done. Um, and in each conversation, he struck me as, I mean, certainly socially, a little awkward on the spectrum, however you want to describe it, but, uh, I mean, look, if you, if you went back and you said you can create any business, you know, on the planet in like 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, a crypto exchange

• 11:46Speaker 02

  would be on the list of businesses that you would create. I mean, they're literally, uh, they're money printing machines. And so my view was that this guy had built what was quickly becoming, uh, a real threat to Binance for, you know, potentially the largest crypto exchange platform in the world. He had a money printing machine. I had gotten advice from numerous people that one of the things to do in a, in a financial crisis, when you're running a business like BlockFi's is attach your boat to a bigger boat, something that can weather the storm. And, uh, FTX seemed like, uh, as good of a place as any, maybe, maybe even a, uh, ideal place to bring a business like, like BlockFi so that we had

• 12:29Speaker 02

  the capital to complete the work that we were doing with the SEC. Our settlement with them wasn't just, hey, we're going to pay you a hundred million dollars. It was, we're going to pay you a hundred million dollars and register our interest account as a security. And it's going to be the first product of its kind that's issued fully legally as a, as a security. Um, and we were going to see that out within FTX. Employees were, you know, going to continue working. We were going to integrate the platforms and bring some of the products that BlockFi had that FTX didn't have onto the FTX platform, which they were excited about. And, uh, that's what we were doing for, you know, roughly a handful of months before FTX blew up in, in November.

• 13:10Anthony Pompliano?

  How'd you find out?

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Uh, I was out on paternity leave and, uh, I, you know, got calls from our, from our team, basically, um, that said, have you seen the news about FTX? I had seen some chirping on Twitter, but it had never crossed my mind that the money wouldn't be there. You own a money printing machine.

• 13:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. How do you not have the money?

• 13:32Speaker 02

  How can you, you know, mess that up? Um, but then through the process of, uh, being a, a witness in the trial, I was a cooperating witness for the prosecution. I, I learned things. Um, maybe the most striking of which was that, uh, the balance sheets that Alameda was sending to lenders, BlockFi included, were just false and that there were Slack messages between Sam and Caroline where Caroline said, here's the balance sheet I'm about to send to BlockFi or another lender. And Sam would say, it doesn't look good. Give me other options. And she would create seven tabs on the spreadsheet, seven or eight tabs,

• 14:11Speaker 02

  all in kind of varying degrees of essentially lies. And then Sam would write back over Slack and he would pick the one that was like essentially the biggest lie. And that's what they were. So some of the things that I learned after the fact.

• 14:25Anthony Pompliano?

  When they send you a, a balance sheet like that, like whether it was BlockFi or other lenders, right? I think one of the things that, uh, I take a lot of the folks on Twitter as, um, take their critiques seriously, but be careful putting too much, you know, weight on any one person. But I think one of the things they'll be like is why didn't you guys go look at the balance sheets? Why didn't you go look at their bank account? Why didn't you, you know, they'll kind of go down this whole rabbit hole of things. Like, what was the normal engagement? And this is, I think is important for some of the work you guys are doing at Galaxy now because you've made a lot of changes, right? To kind of some of these products that I think is, uh, much better for the end investor through some of these lessons. But like, what is that, you know, kind of inter company relationship in terms of like the diligence you would do in some sense of balance sheets? Is it just like, kind of have to take their word for it?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I mean, short answer on Galaxy, my risk appetite and Galaxy's risk appetite are wildly different than, uh, the risk appetite that we had at a company like BlockFi. No rehypothecation on our platform, uh, and no crypto lending, um, both of which were things, you know, crypto lending is, is really hard to scale, maybe even impossible, uh, to scale. Bitcoin doesn't produce a yield. Trying to get it to is, is very challenging. And as you scale, you're kind of forced to go out on the risk spectrum a little bit. Um, but what it looks like, I mean, we had a risk management framework that was overseen by our board that included finance professionals from some of the largest banks in the world. Uh, there was the credit piece of it, which is assessing the financial health of your

• 15:50Speaker 02

  counterparty. And then there was the collateral piece of it, which was, um, you know, taking collateral as security for the loans. And in FTX's case, they were consistently within the crypto market, one of the best capitalized counterparties from a balance sheet and financial statement perspective, and one of the most willing to post collateral counterparties, uh, which they did sometimes with, uh, you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana, but also in some cases with the FTT token.

• 16:20Anthony Pompliano?

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• 17:03Anthony Pompliano?

  This is, I think, uh, we're talking about BlockFi, but obviously there was Celsius, Voyager, right? The FTX, um, but also like Alan Lane, the Silvergate CEO recently wrote a piece and he basically was like, Silvergate was able to process every single customer withdrawal. Silvergate was still solvent and basically my words, not his, but like we got taken out back and shot because we were pioneering in the crypto industry. What do you take from like, I mean, he's like a regulated bank. Like there's no like, hey, we're trying to figure out what the, you know, plan is. It's like, no, dude, we are a bank, right? We are overseen by these regulators. And even he seems to be saying, hey, look, you know, there was some stuff that happened here that made people don't understand.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  I encourage everyone to read, I'm a big fan of Alan Lane's, uh, read his Substack post. It just came out this morning. It's, it's a wonderful post where I think he shares more details about, uh, some of the things that happened at Silvergate that led to their voluntary wind down, uh, than he has before. Um, but if you just zoomed out and you were reading a financial history book that said, hey, there were, there were these pseudo-regulated, kind of unregulated crypto banks that got created at a period of time. Um, and during that period of time, some of the largest banks, including a top 20 bank, it wasn't just Silvergate, um, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed during this same, you know, three to six month window of time. So traditional banks have collapsed. What do you think happens

• 18:30Speaker 02

  to the crypto banks? Anybody who's familiar with financial history would probably say, I bet the crypto banks, uh, went down as well. And then you, you add in the, that's just from a financial markets perspective. When you add in the regulatory lens and some of the things that Alan touched on, some of the, the, um, the delta between what you learned from fintech lessons of the past and then seeing how those things kind of changed in their application from the regulatory posture towards crypto. I think there's a strong case to be made and, and a lot of people will, will have said and will continue to say that, uh, the regulatory posture was wrong. They, they got it wrong, I think.

• 19:12Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think they mentors at the time, what they were trying to do. Yeah. They were recruiting a crypto, uh, anti crypto army. They were trying to kill crypto. They were trying to, you know, all this kind of stuff, whatever. Um, I don't think we give them enough credit for how successful they were. Like they did not stop Bitcoin. They did not stop, you know, kind of the major coins. There were certain companies, Coinbase, Binance, you know, et cetera. But like even Binance, like I would argue that Binance, uh, they didn't die. They were wounded, right? FTX died, right? Some of these other companies died. Um,

• 19:45Anthony Pompliano?

  There was a lot of damage done in this kind of battle. The industry obviously has survived, but I also think that the new administration, many politicians about the right and the left realize like, maybe it's not best to do the battle again, you know, because you're kind of poking the bear. And obviously they saw what happened with, you know, the packs and in the different elections. And like, it just kind of changed everything. Once everyone kind of like woke up from this battle and was kind of bloodied. And then everyone was like, all right, well, like maybe we should just figure out how to work together.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Well, and the question is, what's your, you know, what's your goal as a regulator? I would, I would argue that one of the primary functions is to facilitate society functioning well. And, and as downstream of that is, you know, consumer, certain levels of consumer protections with regard to financial transactions. And surely the crypto world that we live in now for things like Bitcoin, where you have more options, including regulated options brought to you by folks like BlackRock and Fidelity. And you have more publicly traded companies that operate in the crypto sector, who are producing audited financials on a quarterly basis. Surely that's a better word or a better world.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  If it's a given that crypto is going to exist, which I think it is, it, you can't put something that's a new technology like this back into the box. And I just don't know that, you know, that, that full kind of option set was being considered with some of the decisions that were made at the, at the time. Now, you can also argue the other side, which is maybe we've gone, maybe the pendulum has swung a little too far with this administration in terms of allowing certain things to happen, whether that's certain forms of gambling or, or things with meme coins. I mean, there's, you know, there's, there's arguments both ways. I'm generally a, don't let the ping, pendulum doesn't need to swing too far one way or the other, kind of a person.

• 21:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that the government is very bad at intricacies and nuance.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 21:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And you see it like.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Well, there's nuance in this crypto stuff, right? So, you know, Silver, Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank, BlockFi, some other companies who objectively never committed any type of fraud, went down while others who objectively did commit fraud, FTX, Celsius went down. And I think it's hard for people to distinguish between the two things and not just paint with a, a single brush and say all, you know, some fraud, therefore all companies in this category bad, and we need to shut the whole thing down.

• 22:18Anthony Pompliano?

  One aspect that I find fascinating in society is we live in a very memetic time. So, you know, kind of the Democrat party, very anti crypto. Trump counter positions himself and is like, I'm going to be the pro crypto guy. Then they're like, oh, you're going to be the pro crypto guy. Then a bunch of them are like, well, we can't be anti crypto, but let's be anti Trump crypto. Right. And it's just like this constant like battling back and forth. I do think that there's a very large silent majority that is just like, create rules. Everyone shut up and get out of the way, right? But like, like we need to clear rules, right? Which is good, but in a weird way, like the, the volatility back and forth between the political parties almost like helps to create the rules.

• 23:03Anthony Pompliano?

  It's just really painful for everyone who's putting in the industry. Let's say, let's draw a line and say that 2022 or 2023, sometime in that time frame, there's like pre crypto war. And then there is post crypto war. Pre crypto war, we could talk about for hours, but post crypto war, I think that you, at least in our conversations, you kind of went through this journey of like, all right, what went wrong? What did I learn? What, if anything, do I want to do in crypto again, you know, et cetera? Talk about like the lessons you're taking and applying now for Galaxy, because I think there's a lot of people who say, all right, I know Zach as the CEO of BlockFi. I kind of sort of know what happened, but I frankly, maybe even the conversation we just had is like helpful to better understand it.

• 23:47Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean that there's, you know, I can earn interest or any of this stuff? Is it the same thing as BlockFi, right? So just maybe describe some of the nuance or changes and then things that you guys have incorporated with Galaxy.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  So, I mean, just, just personally, I, I initially went through a stint of basically needed to, to rest. I didn't, I didn't work for about six months. And then I think as part of my recovery process, I went and did something completely different from crypto, completely different from venture capital backed tech startups, which is kind of how I broadly defined my work experience prior to crypto. And I was, uh, my first thing I did was I was the CEO of a real estate cost segregation study firm. So this is a tool that real estate investors use to optimize their, you know, after tax returns.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  And, you know, what I liked about that was I like the, I'm a personal finance nerd. I like the idea of helping people to understand finance, access finance in, in, you know, easier ways or ways that are more beneficial for them.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  And so, so that was consistent even at the real estate firm, but after a minute, it wasn't nearly as exciting as, you know, building something powered by technology. And so I think post crypto war, personally, my risk appetite decreased tremendously. For the industry and for myself, I think there's a lot more activity happening with crypto and things that excite me more generally speaking in traditional brokerage accounts than in the crypto market. And I say that from the perspective of a US consumer. I think for folks outside the US, there's still some very interesting crypto applications

• 25:36Speaker 02

  in terms of stablecoin adoption, in terms of tokenizing different forms of real world assets, whether that's stocks or other things, and democratizing access to some of the things that we have here in the US. There's some infrastructure stuff here in the US where, you know, we can reduce settlement times. We can put things on blockchains and make them more transparent that, that I think could be interesting for parts of the securities technology stack. But for the average person, who I was telling in 2015 on a blog that nobody read, you should get some exposure to Bitcoin or you should get some exposure to Ethereum. If you have, you know, liquid assets that you're investing and a little bit of a, you know, appetite for risk.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Now I say to that person, buy, buy whatever brand you have the best affinity to between BlackRock, Fidelity, Bitwise, and you know, a couple other ETF issuers and put it in your brokerage account. And so I would say those are the two big things for me. One is risk appetite dramatically reduced.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  I'm not interested in having a tussle with regulators again. I'm not interested in experiencing some of the things that I experienced trying to generate a yield on crypto that doesn't natively produce it via, you know, proof of stake. And I'm much more interested than I was back then in things like tax efficient investing via a brokerage account. Ways that you can optimize your personal balance sheet and position yourself correctly. Big picture, utilizing some of the lessons that I learned from crypto. I mean, I educated myself so much on macro topics through the crypto industry.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  And so, you know, applying those lessons into building the platform at, at Galaxy One is something I've been doing for a little over a year now, and it's going really well so far. And we're having a ton of fun doing it.

• 27:32Anthony Pompliano?

  What is Galaxy One?

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Galaxy One is a, is a financial app. We have a checking account product, brokerage account product, crypto product, and a product called Galaxy Premium Yield, which is like a private credit instrument, where accredited investors can earn 8% on their cash. Where we're aiming to fit in the financial ecosystem is kind of in between a private bank or a traditional registered investment advisor in terms of the level of customer service that we provide, in terms of the types of advanced investing options and overall asset and liability, full balance sheet management for our clients. In between that world and the world of fintech, where you can do things at your fingertips.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  You've got AI tools built into the app. You have everything kind of in one place and easily accessible to you. But what we're not doing in the app that is something maybe we'll touch on that a lot of fintech apps are leaning into these days is stuff that's more in the category of gambling, whether that's prediction markets or cer- certain forms of like super leveraged investment options that it's hard to see fitting into any type of long-term portfolio. So we won't be doing that stuff like a lot of fintech companies are.

• 28:52Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like the ones who are doing that are purely looking at it from the numbers. And they're like, these markets are exploding.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, they can charge people 5% and every time they, they trade an event based, you know, contract. It's a great way to make money. I don't think it's a, I don't think platforms like that are where investors are going to manage large percentages of their long-term capital of their, you know, nest egg that they've built up for their family. You don't need that next to.

• 29:21Anthony Pompliano?

  But I wonder how many of those platforms are even trying to get that money, right? Like that my read is, let's just take Robinhood, let's take a Kaochi, let's take a DraftKings, a Polymarket, a FanDuel, right? Even Coinbase has started to, you know, add some of these contracts, et cetera. I think most of them look at it as like, hey, we want the trading assets. Not like we want your, you know, uh, your kids' uh, school tuition money, you know, super extreme examples, but like, it's very much like a volumes based business versus more of a long-term oriented investor.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 30:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And just naturally like a savings account versus a trading account, you know, are going to have different optimizations, right?

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And not saying that those aren't good businesses.

• 30:08Anthony Pompliano?

  They're right. Listen, I was an investor in many of those businesses. I get it, right?

• 30:14Speaker 02

  It's just not where my personal interests lie. And part of that is probably just from the evolution of, you know, what I personally am interested in, in my, in my own investing.

• 30:23Anthony Pompliano?

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• 31:04Anthony Pompliano?

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• 31:48Anthony Pompliano?

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• 32:32Anthony Pompliano?

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• 32:47Anthony Pompliano?

  This premium yield, uh, one of the things that, um, I think I understand is it is for accredited investors, they put their money in, their cash, they earn, uh, 8%, and I think what's most interesting though is Galaxy is backing the fund with their balance sheet. So there's never no risk, but like, it is drastically reducing the risk than if they were just doing this with, you know, some sort of private credit, which obviously a lot of people have had questions about, you know, with the marks or whatever.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, first off, though, I mean, the reason that Galaxy is able to do this, uh, is because of their institutional lending desk, which has principal outstanding over the last, uh, you know, from the last earning, earnings report of well north of a billion dollars. A large portion of that is cash. And, uh, as a result, you know, crypto capital markets are still more expensive than traditional capital markets on a risk-adjusted basis, in my opinion. Um, and as a result, Galaxy can, you know, earn these yields through activities that it's already doing on the institutional side of the business. We capped the size of our premium yield product on the Galaxy One app at $250 million, which is just a fraction of its overall institutional lending book, and then Galaxy put a guarantee on

• 34:02Speaker 02

  it. In terms of how consumers actually interact with it, it's a, uh, it started as a 60-day duration product, so you put your money in, when you want to get it out, 60 days later it comes out. We recently reduced that from 60 days down to 30 days. Um, the rate is also, uh, variable with 30-day notice. We haven't changed it since we launched the product almost a year ago now. Um, but the rate could change with 30-day notice, uh, and folks can withdraw their funds in 30 days. So I think it's a great option for folks with, um, short-term cash, uh, that they want to get an attractive, uh, an attractive yield on. With the backing of, you know, Galaxy would publicly trade it on the NASDAQ, north of

• 34:42Speaker 02

  a $10 billion market cap, last time I checked. Um, so, uh, yeah, it's an attractive product.

• 34:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, that's for like dollar cash.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  Cash, correct.

• 34:53Anthony Pompliano?

  You also have a crypto portfolio lending product? How does that work?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  We, we recently launched a crypto portfolio line of credit product. That's for borrowing cash. So if you have a portfolio either of just Bitcoin, uh, or Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, you can now borrow against those assets as a, as a single portfolio on Galaxy One at a rate below 9%, uh, which to my knowledge is the best rate that you can get in, in, you know, SeFi land and crypto. Um, and it's a flexible product. You can come in and out with no origination fees. You can pay it off anytime. It's monthly interest throughout the duration of, uh, the time that you've drawn on the, on the line of credit. And while you have your assets staked, uh, if you're staking Solana and borrowing against

• 35:42Speaker 02

  it, you still earn the Solana staking rewards, um, even while they're posted as collateral. So.

• 35:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And what is like Solana staking rewards right now, do you know?

• 35:49Speaker 02

  I think it's ballpark 6%. Um, and we're offering Solana staking, you know, Galaxy also has a large, uh, business as a, uh, uh, staking infrastructure provider to, uh, institutions. We're piggybacking off of that infrastructure and offering staking on the Galaxy One app. And because we're piggybacking off of that, we're actually offering staking with zero commissions currently through the end of the year. Um, compare that to, you know, 20, 25, 30% that you're paying in, uh, fees off of your staking commissions at, at a lot of other, uh, platforms.

• 36:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So I could technically borrow at 9% or something, and I'm still earning the 6% on it. And so it's like a blended 3%, you know, cost of capital. It's like one way to think about it.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  That's one way to think about it.

• 36:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and that's very, uh, uh, very unique. Um, you also have brokerage?

• 36:45Speaker 02

  We have a brokerage.

• 36:46Anthony Pompliano?

  So the idea here really is to build kind of like a one app for all of your financial needs, but it's less focused on trading and kind of speculation and more focused on kind of just like good timeless investing principles?

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Good timeless investing principles, full balance sheet management. So, you know, the, the crypto portfolio line of credit, I think is a market-leading borrowing option if you want to borrow against your crypto. We'll be coming out with, uh, a similar option for brokerage account assets over time. I also think we'll look at, um, different types of lending, whether that's real estate lending or, or other forms of lending to clients of the Galaxy One app over time. Um, and yeah, you have, you know, banking, brokerage, crypto, and attractive alternative investments all, uh, under one roof. And I think we'll be doing other things that, you know, I think there's a large audience. A lot of them listen

• 37:43Speaker 02

  to your podcast. You talk about self-directed investors and the tools that are available to them. Um, I like this concept of unbundling the traditional registered investment advisor model. A lot of folks now are aware that paying 1% on AUM to an asset manager, uh, can produce quite a drag on your portfolio over the long term. But there are pieces of what registered investment advisors do that I think folks are very interested in. And so they just don't want to pay a 1% fee to get access to all of those. And so you'll, you'll be seeing things from us, um, around that theme, uh, you know, for the foreseeable future with new products that, uh, that we have in the pipeline.

• 38:24Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a, uh, financial advisor online. He was chirping at me one day.

• 38:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I was just like, who is this guy? Click on the profile, go to the link in his bio, end up on some, you know, financial advisor somewhere in America, start scrolling through. I don't got time for all of this. See the ADV, go, and I just started like, where's the fees?

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And they charge up to a 1.75% management fee on the financial advising, you know, assets. So not like a venture capitalist who's like, hey, I'm an helper from the market or, you know, whatever, right? And whether they do that or not, it's kind of for you to underwrite. This is just like a pure financial advisor, 1.75. And there was, you know, a discount to fees, the more size, you know, of your account, whatever. But I was just like, man, in what world are people paying 1.75% to a financial advisor? Who, based on his critiques of me, obviously, he's not that smart. But, you know, I was kind of just like, thinking to myself, I'm like, man, there's obviously great financial advisors, there's great firms, there's great, you know, and these people have built massive businesses.

• 39:31Anthony Pompliano?

  But it is kind of crazy that in 2026, people are still getting charged insane fees from, maybe for, you know, kind, kind of average firms or average, you know, kind of solutions in the market.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and a lot of times they're sticking you in a traditional 60/40 portfolio, which I would argue, for a lot of folks who have gone through the education process that, that you and I have, is not appropriate, given the risk appetite of the client. If you're under the age of 40, I don't think you need a 40% allocation to bonds. Maybe even if you're under the age of 50 or 60, depending on, on your situation. But, I mean, you, you talk about, you know, bonds and fixed income all the time.

• 40:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I love the TLT chart. It really gets the people going, down 50% in the last five years.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  Right. And so.

• 40:29Anthony Pompliano?

  They tell me that's not real bonds.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  We're, we're going to be, you know, on the, on the asset side of bringing products to our clients, we're going to be reevaluating some of those, you know, time-tested principles. I don't think it's too risky for someone under the age of 40 to be allocated to a portfolio that's 100% equities or, or equity-like instruments. Take that a step further, depending on where that person is in their life cycle of investing, is it a bad thing to put a conservative amount of leverage on that portfolio? When I say conservative amount of leverage, I'm talking like in the 10 to 30% range, not, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5X, like you can do with, with perp equities.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  But, you know, but there've been really famous researchers and professors who've written books and showed mathematically that that is the mathematically sound way to approach investing when you're young and you're earning years and you're, you know, building up your asset base. And so we're thinking about those things. We have products coming out over the course of the coming months that will help to illustrate this view and make this view accessible to clients of the app. In addition to continuing to have market-leading crypto products, continuing to add things in the, in the banking sector, whether that's new payment functionality.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  You know, one of the things that, that private banks do that I absolutely love is they make it really easy to send wires, which if you're someone who, you know, allocates to a venture capital fund or, you know, has to pay contractors for home renovations or, or something on a schedule, you might have to send a wire or two every month. And it is painful to type in, you know, manually, in this day and age, the fact that so many people still have to go to a bank branch to verify or manually type in wire instructions. There's also a lot of just these operational things that I've experienced personally and validated with other people that we want to help to automate and make way easier for

• 42:38Speaker 02

  clients of the Galaxy One app.

• 42:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that, like, agents will do all that stuff in the future? Right? Like, I see people online, there's like, you know, I told my agent, like, go, go pay this. And, I don't know, I see a screenshot, it says paid, like, I guess the agent did it, this is the claim. Like, is that something that you guys would ever turn on?

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're, we're having a lot of debate internally around whether, you know, whether the main way that that should happen is through us having good, essentially, kind of command line interfaces, where we open up the app and enable our users to give whatever AI agent they want to use the requisite permissions within the Galaxy One app and then have an external agent instructing the app on behalf of the user. Or if it's to have kind of natively built into the app, AI agent-like functionality, where you can just say, the same way you would to, to, you know, whatever AI system

• 43:38Speaker 02

  you like to use, but within our app, hey, do X, Y, and Z once a month. Or, you know, monitor these property tax bills and pay them when they're due. You know, like, so TBD, we might ultimately end up with a mix of both. There are some, like, compliance and security things that we're thinking through with the command line prompting for financial transactions. That's certainly could get risky if somebody has a third-party AI that they give access to our system and then it does something that the user doesn't like. And so we're, we're working through that stuff. But for anybody that doesn't know, Galaxy is an incredibly AI-forward company.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  I mean, we didn't, we didn't touch on Galaxy Corporate at, at the outset, but Galaxy essentially has two large businesses now. It's crypto business, which started in institutional financial services and has expanded into retail with the Galaxy One app. But it's also now in the AI data center business with a larger than 5 gigawatt power pipeline in Texas, primarily at its Helios, Helios campus, but also Galaxy's now multi, multi-campus now in terms of its data center sites. And so I think there's really interesting crossover applications of those two things in time. And the culture within the firm, just generally speaking, is incredibly AI-forward.

• 45:01Anthony Pompliano?

  You guys just did the football stadium, right? It was Texas Tech?

• 45:05Speaker 02

  And I'm originally from Texas, so this is near and dear to my heart. I mean, I haven't been there yet.

• 45:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  I'm hoping that, I'm hoping that I'll be on the list for the, the Galaxy.

• 45:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Alex Thorne, how did Alex Thorne get out there? Yeah, I saw him already, he was already out there. I said, what the heck? If I ask him, I text him, I say, oh, I was going to record a podcast, that's what I'm going to tell me.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  I'm hoping.

• 45:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Doing research.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  I'm hoping I'll get on the list at a, on the list for, for a game at some point. But, um, yeah, Galaxy Stadium in Lubbock, Texas now.

• 45:30Anthony Pompliano?

  It's pretty crazy.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  It's, uh, it's awesome. It's, it's awesome.

• 45:32Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, where can we send people to check out Galaxy One app?

• 45:36Speaker 02

  You can get there through Galaxy's, you know, corporate website as well, or you can just search Galaxy One in any app store, iPhone or Android. We're also on Twitter. We have phone customer service, chat-based customer service. You can DM me on Twitter and I will respond to you quickly if you have any questions. We can also set up calls with our client service team. We have a US-based, super smart client service team that can talk about our platform, but also just, you know, generally anything in the financial world that you're looking to talk about. So I would really encourage folks to reach out.

• 46:14Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so Galaxy One in the app store, go, go check it out.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  Go check it out. Thanks for having me, Paul.

• 46:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks for coming and doing it.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Good to see you.