["Pomp and Circumstance"]
["Pomp and Circumstance"]
["Pomp and Circumstance"]
["Pomp and Circumstance"]
["Pomp and Circumstance"]
["Pomp and Circumstance"]
["Pomp and Circumstance"]
["Pomp and Circumstance"]
["Pomp and Circumstance"]
All right, wow, 112 people already, that's incredible.
Thank you, everyone, for joining.
What an incredible day to have our first Twitter space
We hit a really good run last year
and had some fantastic guests across the board.
And I think, you know, the whole Metallicus community
will testify that, you know,
our favorite chats have been with Eleanor.
So we're absolutely delighted to welcome Eleanor back.
And, of course, I think the first time we've heard
from Marshall officially this year as well.
And I think there's a lot of stuff that, you know,
I think it's been a very, very interesting few weeks
for the start of the year of the industry.
And we're very excited for the both of you to have a chat.
So, you know, without further ado,
Eleanor, welcome, Marshall, welcome.
It's so nice to hear someone say my name correctly
for a change or say it at least in the way
that my parents gave it to me.
It's Eleanor, not Eleanor, with the English accent.
So I appreciate that, Will.
And I have to say, you know,
we met for coffee the other day in New York City
when you were up here to visit.
And it was an absolute pleasure to not only meet you,
but also to discuss digital assets and blockchain
over a cup of coffee as opposed to, you know,
on the phone or on WhatsApp or over X.
It was just so nice to be able to talk about it in person.
It was sort of a novelty.
And I wish Marshall could have joined us,
but hopefully there'll be more opportunities to come
So I just want to say thank you for having me.
And I'm excited for this chat.
Marshall, I don't remember the last time we did one of these.
I want to say it was probably spring,
maybe April or May of last year.
So, you know, that's like, I don't know,
So we have a lot to catch up on.
And, you know, specifically, I cover regulation.
That's what makes me tick in this industry.
And you're the CEO of a company that integrates digital assets
So you've also got your finger on this pulse of things
You're an industry watcher.
You've seen everything go down.
But before we get into, you know,
the plethora of things I want to discuss,
I just want to, just for people who are listening,
who may not be familiar with Metallicus
or with you and the mission,
can you just give us a little TLDR on you?
And I'm going to try this.
Eleanor, did I get it right?
It's like Eleanor, but without the H, yeah.
Thanks for having me, Will.
And thanks for everyone being here.
And it's great to be back with you, Eleanor.
It's been, I think, over a year.
I want to say it was 22 or maybe beginning of 23,
but it's been over a year.
Yeah, for those that don't know a little bit of background
about Metallicus and myself,
I'm an entrepreneur in the crypto space for over a decade,
I've been building for most of that time.
And Metallicus is a company that I formed about eight years ago now.
Our vision has been to integrate traditional finance
and banking and payments into blockchain,
build a holistic blockchain network that covers everything
from payments to trading to banking,
and how that integrates into the modern financial system,
into the banking world, into the card payments world.
And we've built a pretty cool ecosystem here.
Our focus has always been on creating a good experience,
good ease of use, good customer experience.
And our ethos has really been about transparency and compliance
and working within the system.
The original crypto ethos was really down with the old system,
but the Metallicus ethos has evolved the old system and upgraded.
And so we're really, really excited to be here today.
And thanks, Elena, and thanks, Will, and let's kick it off.
Yeah, it's refreshing to hear you say that,
because I feel like there's a few companies in the space
that I've dealt with before.
And you guys are sort of what I like to call the silent killers.
You don't make a lot of headlines.
You kind of fly under the radar,
but you do a great job at what you do.
And you're more of builders than showers.
I'm just going to say something really high school either.
But you can probably guess what I was about to say.
You guys like to build and show what you're doing after the fact
and prove to your customers and to the world
that there are good actors in this space.
So I applaud you guys for that.
And there are a couple of people that I speak to
on a relatively regular basis who are doing the same thing.
So yeah, it's great to hear you say that.
Well, it's been a long time since we've chatted.
You guys have been working and you've got some cool stuff in the works.
So I do want to just circle back and let's just get into, I don't know,
perhaps the most between the cutting edge of crypto and trad-fi
finally getting married or being in the same room
at the same time without fighting or hating each other.
The market event that the industry has been waiting for essentially
for a long time, I guess at least since the Bitcoin futures ETF
Last month, the SEC approved 11 Bitcoin spot ETFs.
And as you know, it was a bit of a bumpy road, but it finally happened.
I finally got it to launch.
And Marshall, you're a crypto guy at heart, right?
You worked at Stellar, you're on the Dogecoin board,
you're CEO and founder of Metallicus.
So what's your take on it as like a native crypto guy?
I know there's some sort of, you know,
with people who are sort of traditionally crypto minded,
there was some hesitancy, whether this is really a good thing for the industry
and then others say, no, it's a great thing because finally, you know,
we're getting the recognition that we've been fighting for for so long.
So what's your take? Is this good for the industry?
And where do you see this going now that we finally got those Bitcoin spot ETFs
launched and out of the way? What's next?
Yeah, I think that these are great questions.
I think what's interesting is that I have, you know,
when I first got involved in Bitcoin, when there was no other crypto,
in 2009, there was no way to buy it.
There was no way to sell it.
Well, there was, but I'll explain.
There was no Coinbase, there was no Metallicus, there was no Kraken,
there was no Uniswap, there was no Ethereum.
And it was just a bunch of guys and gals on internet relay chat
and forums, Reddit and so forth, Bitcoin talk,
and we would just trade P2P.
Hey, you want me to buy you a pizza and you send me the Bitcoin?
That's how that guy Laszlo lost millions of dollars on the pizza.
I was one of those guys and I saw and I could feel that, you know,
once I saw what Bitcoin and crypto could be, I thought,
this is so much further than, you know,
the original crypto anarchist vision.
It's going to completely transform everything.
It's not going to be, let's use an analogy of cinema.
It's not going to be the end of cinema.
It's going to be the end of Blockbuster and video rental,
but it's not going to be the end of media, right?
And same thing with finance and money and payments.
Blockchain isn't the end of banking, isn't the end of payments,
And what we saw recently was we've turned a page in crypto.
I made a prediction list right before FTX exploded or imploded,
I kind of saw what was coming, right?
I could see all these things very clearly.
So I just wrote them down and sent them to a group of my friends.
And then I thought, well, maybe I should publish this a little bit more widely,
but I was nervous to publish it because I was afraid of the powers that be.
A lot of these guys had a lot of power and I didn't want them to say,
oh, if he says I'm going to jail, I'm going to attack him on social media
and I'm going to make him look bad or whatever.
At the end, a lot of the bad players,
they either pretended to embrace compliance and then got found out
like the SVFs, like the others, or they just kind of threw it to the wind.
But at the end of the day,
the compliance portion is critical to upgrade the system.
We actually have a lot to do in the world of banking and traditional finance
And there's a lot of places where blockchain and crypto can solve that.
But previously, people had kind of shoved crypto in random places
that didn't belong or trying to search for solutions to problems
that don't exist and things like that.
And Metallicus, my vision, has always been the banking and payment side.
You may notice other founders, they see something and they chase.
I saw somebody say, oh, Metallicus is pivoting to AI.
No, we're just launching a product that's an AI product
where you can pay with crypto.
We've always stayed focused on the payments and the banking.
And I think that this latest shift is a move away from the old guard.
So if you saw my prediction list, SPF, we knew that FTX would implode.
We knew that Binance would have those problems, right?
And all this stuff came true.
Now, who's kind of the new stablecoin king?
And there's someone I follow on Twitter that tweets about all the time.
He says, BlackRock, new stablecoin king, nobody gets it yet.
The ETF was kind of that change in the old guard.
And why is Circle suddenly removing USDC from Tron?
That's another one of my predictions, right?
Everything that you could imagine in terms of buttoning up and fixing the compliance
and the legacy financial world coming into blockchain and crypto,
it's all happening right now.
And there's a lot of people that will scream and say, no, they can't do that
or they'll never work or it will work.
And you're going to watch as all of the kind of old guard falls away.
In fact, most of it already has from 2022.
So the Bitcoin ETF, all these things, love it or hate it,
it was bound to happen because from the moment we opened the Pandora's box
that was Bitcoin, all the crypto that sprang out of it, this was inevitable.
And I actually didn't think that it would get as bad as it did before the summer of 22.
But I'm glad that it's over.
And people that are watching the markets are saying, oh, the bull market's back, maybe.
But what's definitely changed is the complete ethos of crypto.
The idea of identity on chain and linking into your bank account,
that's actually a good thing because we want to make it easy and safe.
And all the things that are coming for crypto,
it's going to be a complete sea change in the way that we think about it,
the way that people used to think about it,
that people that are not involved in crypto
would have the impression that crypto is anonymous
or it's for evading taxes or it's for this or that.
But the thing is that a lot of that perception got painted from the bad players.
Now, the next phase of this is going to be, oh, crypto, that's a technology
that links all the banks together.
That's a technology that makes payments easier and faster.
And we got a little taste of it with Apple Pay over the past couple of years
and G Pay and contactless payments.
But wait until you see how this changes business
because if you think that it was crazy in 2000
when the dot-com boom happened in email and social media and all that,
wait until you see banking change because that will fundamentally change the world.
So you talk about this fundamental shift,
this change in, I guess, in optics,
but also in opinion and real general sentiment about the crypto industry in general.
What do you chalk that up to?
I mean, I know a lot of people say it's because Larry Fink did his 180
from calling Bitcoin the institution of money laundering to a digital,
I think when Larry Fink talks, people listen.
But is there any other factor you see that may have attributed to that shift
aside from just BlackRock coming around to the idea
that Bitcoin might actually not be so bad after all?
Well, the funny thing that I've observed is that people in the early days of crypto,
flashback 10 years, people would look at the Finks and the Diamonds and all these guys
and say, oh, these are the bad guys, whatever.
But they really are the ones that are moving the markets that are the number one bank
All the other banks are looking at JPMorgan Chase
in terms of technology innovation and things like that.
And where's the disconnect there?
Where's the disconnect there?
Is it just a front that Jamie Dimon's putting on, sort of like an act?
Yeah, that's what I was just about to say is it's all politics.
He hates Bitcoin while CZ and Sam are making things look bad.
And that's when you say, okay, well, it's all for money laundering.
But guess what's really awesome?
JPM dollar stablecoin on the onyx blockchain, right?
He's going to root for his home team.
But when the space gets cleaned up and traditional financial institutions come in
and regulators come in and things start to change and compliance gets embraced,
it's a completely different 180.
Now you want to buy Bitcoin.
You want to buy it through the ETF with BlackRock.
You want to use JPMorgan Chase onyx.
Of course, use your stablecoins in their system and buy Bitcoin costed in their
But watch as they all do a complete 180.
It will look back in 2025 and 2026 and go, wait, wasn't it just like a few years
ago that he was saying this was like the money laundering thing and it was really
And, you know, for example, too, let's use politician example, because we know
how quickly they change sides.
She said all these things that are, you know, anti crypto and whatever.
Now you see your friend John Deaton coming in and challenging her in Massachusetts
Somebody even already tried to make a like a prank that she had.
It's it's already been named into existence.
It's not that there's anything wrong with crypto.
It's the people that saw an opportunity in the early days, the Wild West, to take
And just like the Wild West, eventually things evolve.
And, you know, we we build things out.
But in the early days, yeah, you're going to have robber barons, you're going to
have stagecoach robberies.
And that was, you know, twenty four, twenty fourteen to twenty twenty two.
Well, I guess I should say twenty seventeen to twenty twenty two.
But yeah, for those those five years, it was it was a lot of chaos.
And, you know, people are also really hungry for opportunities to make money.
So they will take chances on things like Luna and things like that.
But as crypto evolves, also the space is beginning to self police and to look at risky things,
you know, potential restaking or, you know, derivative auction coins and things like
that that can destabilize the market is potentially riskier.
I'm not saying that people are not doing that.
Obviously, there's a lot of hype around that.
But I think the second time around, people are much more cautious.
And yeah, I think that, you know, over the next few years, you're going to see much more,
I guess, plain kind of vanilla products for crypto, but they will be offered by your
banks. And, you know, I think that I think that the central banks are nervous about this
stuff. And you're going to see a rush to release CBDCs.
And you see the ECB, you know, today or was it yesterday, you know, saying bad things
about Bitcoin, but they're nervous about, you know, will we have dominance with, you
know, CBDC? Well, they better hurry up and launch it.
But at the end of the day, you're going to see all of the stuff that you have come to
know and love in crypto inside your bank over the next few years.
And that's pretty much a guarantee for me. Or I mean, I can't 100 percent know anything,
but some things are very obvious and that's going to become one of those things.
I think, you know, there were companies like there's companies like New York Day who kind
of jumped on the bandwagon early.
They might have been a little bit too early, but it will it will happen.
And just like we saw faster payments, the beginning of like Zell or even the rise of
future rise of FedNow, all this stuff is going to be in your bank.
The banking system is not going to go away, but it's going to evolve.
And I think that, you know, a lot of the bad behavior, scared regulators, scared banks.
But now most a lot of that is is cleaned up and is being cleaned up.
So we've essentially turned a page in crypto.
Now we're on to the regulated portion, which I've been talking about for the past few years.
And everybody said I was crazy.
You know, pre 2020, even, you know, the past couple of years, oh, finance will that will
You know, FTX is flawless.
Well, I think that we should start embracing the power of blockchain and using it in the
way that it was meant to be used instead of kind of reinventing these old systems that
don't give the transparency and don't give the trust.
Put it on chain where you can, where it makes sense.
Or maybe everybody should just start listening to you, Marshall.
I think people would be a hell of a lot better off if they seem to have had a fair few number
of good calls over the years.
And I swear we share like half a break.
Like you have half my brain.
I have half yours because you're answering like things that I wanted to bring up.
And in just like, you know, you're covering all these things that I really want to talk
You know, one thing I heard you mention was the CBDC.
And, you know, I've been I have contact with a couple of GOP congressmen, you know, namely
Tom Emmer, Ted Cruz, a Republican senator.
There's a handful of these pretty powerful politicians in the House on the Republican
side that are very, very anti CBDC.
And, you know, we're seeing this now being pushed in the in the presidential election
You know, Trump brought it up.
Vivek was very, you know, very vocal about it.
You see it being rolled out, you know, sometime in the future.
I mean, how much pushback is that going to get from from politicians?
I mean, is there is there room to roll it out?
I mean, will they just keep blocking the Fed?
I guess I guess it all kind of depends on who you know, who has the majority and who's
But do you really think that, you know, America will start embracing CBDCs in the way that
China and other and other countries have?
I think, you know, cash is cash at the end of the day.
And one of the things that I think that I predict that will happen is that that the
world government central banks will face begin to phase out physical bills and paper
For once, it's a lot to maintain.
You have to have, for example, the United States, the Secret Service monitors counterfeit
and fraud, all these things around it as a small business.
You know, during covid, it was like, you know, we don't even want to touch the money.
But it will get phased out.
One of the one of the interesting and funny things to me is people have kind of blown
things out of proportion.
I'll use an analogy of I use this analogy many times of the parcel service or mail system.
So imagine if people said, oh, no, USPS, United States Postal Service, they're just going
to they're going to take over the whole mail industry and they're going to open all of
our mail and they're going to read all of our letters.
We can't allow this to happen.
You'll have them and most and a lot of people will use the private options because they'll
They might be more expensive.
The government will probably always be cheaper and be more connected into the bank.
But the center, the private options, your FedEx, if you will, your DHL, your UPS, those
will be your alternative stable coins.
And so it's really important.
The danger is if we ban, if we go against innovation, we ban private stable coins and
so you can only use a CBDC.
Not CBDC existing, but the idea of like CBDC being having the supremacy over all the other
stable coins and we ban everything else.
That would be just as dangerous as saying, you know, we can't have private banks anymore.
We can only have federalized banks.
That I think is the danger of stable coins is if you cut off all innovation, you cut
off all access, then it does become a surveillance and control tool.
But if you have the ability to access the private industry, who is, you know, I hate
Well, I don't hate to say it.
Maybe some people hate to hear it, but it's always going to be better than the government.
The private industry is always going to be better.
Show me one example where, you know, government run business is better than the private industry.
You can't find any example, right?
No offense to people in government, but it's just that's just the way that the market works.
So when it comes to CBDC, there's not too much to be afraid of as long as you have choices.
And that's why I think it's so important that our representatives like Emmer and everyone
in Congress, Loomis, everyone that's fighting for crypto.
That's why it's so important that we need to keep the options open.
We need to protect not just stable coins, but all of crypto.
We need to have access while simultaneously protecting the public, right?
We want we if we want to treat crypto like money, then it's going to be regulated like
But at the same time, we need to be careful not to regulate innovation out of existence.
Why do you think there's such a fear of CBDCs as opposed to stable coins?
Because I feel like I feel like people, politicians, namely, don't really understand, you know,
what the differences are.
And I feel like CBDCs have gotten a bad rep, especially in GOP circles, just because of
the potential for, you know, surveillance, mass surveillance of the American people,
like what China uses or, you know, allegedly what China uses to, you know, to spy on their
their citizens' financial activity.
You know, you talk about optionality and having those those options, you know, for for for
government digital dollars and for and also for the private sector, you know, what's what's
really the main what's the main difference then between, you know, what should what what
would politicians want to know about the difference between CBDCs and stable coins?
Well, you know, for I'll start with, you know, just on the on the premise that if for people
that are nervous about the surveillance and control, I've got news for you, that's already
If you have a bank account, guess what, you know, the bank is watching your transactions for
many reasons to protect you, but to protect other customers of the bank and to uphold the
compliance standards and regulations.
So, you know, the idea that something is going to change is is probably wrong.
Right. You know, when it comes to CBDC, I think what it's going to do is accelerate faster
payments. But everything at the end of the day, whether using crypto or not, is going to go
through a bank at some point. Right.
Nothing really changes there.
I mean, yes, the government has more ability to track and trace cash and things like that.
It's a double edged sword.
Now we can track political donations better and makes me wonder why people like Warren and
You know, how did they get to be worth 70, 100 million plus dollars on government salary?
Right. But when we can track and trace, you know, it's a double edged sword.
I think that there's a fear around it because of when you look at authoritarian government, when
you look at the Chinese Communist Party, it's clear what they're trying to do with their
CBDC, with their digital yuan.
Right. They are trying to track and control people and they have their they have their
social dystopian credit system and all this stuff.
The question is, does America want to go that route?
Just throw the CBDC conversation out the window for a second.
That's going to define how the CBDC is used.
So we have to ask that question first.
And I'll be honest, you know, it's a step away from the crypto talk for a second.
I am very nervous about the future of the country, seeing a lot of things that really
scare me. But when it comes to CBDC, it's really a question of, you know, how does the
government use it? And again, I'll go back to this.
I think that it's really important that we protect the private industry, we protect
innovation. Yeah, we want rules and regulations, but we don't want to make it so
difficult that nobody can comply, nobody can operate because then then, yeah, then
you're paving the way for an authoritarian system that nobody's going to like.
And it's going to you're going to take this amazing, powerful tool and turn it into a
weapon against the public.
And that's what I think, you know, Trump is nervous about.
That's what Kennedy is nervous about.
And they're saying, you know, OK, we'll never allow it.
And people have asked me, what will happen if they never allow it?
Will that stop, you know, the growth of crypto and says, no, we already have billions,
hundreds of, you know, over one hundred billion dollars in stable coins.
And that's just scratching the surface.
At some point, it will be trillions.
What we need to protect is the right to innovate the right for private stable coin
issuance. And we need to protect that.
That is the most important thing, because the CBDC march will happen no matter what.
There is. I hate to say it and I hate to say it, but there is no stopping it.
It's like it's like trying to say, like, oh, I don't like these people with the
Apple Vision Pro or the Google Glass.
No, it's coming. It might fail in a few iterations, but eventually people will be
wearing these things and we just have to kind of get used to it.
But question is, is how do we use it for good?
How do we how do we pave a pathway for this thing for technology to serve us versus
us being forced to serve it?
Well, let's add that to the list of Marshall's predictions for 2024.
We will see a CBDC rollout in the near future.
Let's switch. I think so.
Yeah. Yeah. I think it makes sense, too.
I want to talk about sort of in the same vein, but all this, you know, we talk about
education, we talk about politicians, the public, the government, like, you know,
federal agencies not exactly being on the same page when it comes to crypto
education. Right. Like, there's so much misinformation being circulated by this
administration. I put out a piece today on, you know, Emmer is, you know, he sent a
letter to the Office of Management and Budget because they approved an emergency
measure by the the Energy Department to to basically like circumvent normal
procedures to get more information on Bitcoin miners and and their energy
consumption. You know, you say it kind of doesn't really sound like a big deal
until you sort of dive into the specifics of it.
And you realize that, oh, like, you know, the justification for it is that, you know,
the price of Bitcoin is sky high now and therefore the strain on the on the servers
is going to be such where, like, you know, it's going to cause mass power outages.
And then this cold snap that we're having is going to be detrimental because, you know,
the Bitcoin miners are taking up so much energy and it's just like you read stuff
like that. And you see the administration saying, oh, yeah, that makes sense.
It will let you do this emergency injunction or whatever it is, a request.
And and then you see you see politicians like Elizabeth Warren, who who ride and die
and actually launch bills based on faulty data that came out in a report about crypto
being the number one fundraising tool for terrorists.
And there's so much misinformation out there.
How do we how do we fix that?
How does that change? Is it just a matter of time when, you know, when when, like you
said, like these things just sort of naturally get integrated into the into the ecosystem
and into the the world of finance and politics?
Or is it you know, is is there is there a push that that the industry needs to do to
educate these lawmakers more?
Like, what do you see as the sort of the the the solution to all of this?
Because it really is quite, you know, it's quite disturbing if you think about how much
how much negative press and and frankly, like false facts are out there surrounding just
Yeah, I think that, you know, to start with the proof of work argument
and a lot of people know where I stand on this.
I I believe that proof of work served its purpose, you know, in 2009, 2010, 2011.
And then as the technology evolved into systems that don't require that computational work
and energy, now we have proof of stake systems that are just as secure.
And, you know, people will debate me on this.
But, you know, I would counter with, OK, then go ahead and hack Ethereum.
Go ahead. Prove me wrong. Right.
I think that Bitcoin will evolve over time as much as as a lot of people don't want to
hear that. I do believe consensus and the technology will change.
And, you know, I think the massive energy consumption is is wasteful.
There's lots of different spins that can be put on this.
Oh, it's going to power green energy.
It's going to whatever. But technology always evolves and moves in the direction where the
least resistance is. And, you know, Bitcoin is approaching.
It's it's approaching one percent of all global energy consumption.
That's crazy. That's too much when you consider that it could be secured for a lot less.
So I think on that front, I do think that that will change.
I think that Bitcoin mining and proof of work mining will keep getting pushed into different
geographies around the world where it's more embraced, where it's supported, where there's
less regulation. New York, for example, banned Bitcoin mining.
But I do I do believe that that technology will improve.
It's part of the reason why, you know, when we started building metal blockchain, we had
the vision of, hey, let's virtualize these networks like Bitcoin.
We can make it faster. We can bring it on to proof of stake.
We can give it smart contracts.
We can make energy efficient.
And just in case we do need that fallback network, OK, it's there.
Right. In terms of what's it going to take to, you know, to make it mainstream to, you know,
right now, it's things are still niche.
People are, you know, frankly, gambling.
People are taking bets on, you know, what might happen.
But we haven't really seen what can happen in a way that affects us.
Right. So when you log into your bank and you see, you know, metal blockchain integrated or
the ability to withdraw stablecoin or CBDC from your bank accounts instantly,
and that payment can be made anywhere around the world that when you can't live without it,
when it's something that really brings value to your small business, to your life, then, you
know, there's no one that's in Congress or the Senate that's going to tell you otherwise.
Right. When it hits, you know, critical mass.
So I think that, you know, the most important part is really people getting that value and
getting to that step. And the first part of that was turning the page with essentially
turning the page with what, you know, has happened recently with the ETF, with, you know,
kind of the purging of the old guard, anyone who's not compliance, the idea of digital
identity. And, you know, digital identity doesn't mean that you have to dox yourself online
and put your name on your account, but it will allow for easier movement between the
blockchain and the bank. And at the end of the day, that's what people want. They want
low friction. They don't want to send crypto to the wrong address. They don't want to, you
know, lose money. And I think that as that system evolves and you see it in the legacy
system, that's where it begins to change. And you're seeing the very beginning of that
with like, you know, PayPal dollar and Venmo accepting crypto and cash app and Revolut and
all the major payments apps, apps integrating it. But eventually they'll all be running on
decentralized networks and also private networks and the hybrid where they essentially
connect between, you know, private networks and public networks. I think that will have a big
mixture. I'm a multi, obviously I'm a multi blockchain, multi currency guy. I don't think
that there's one blockchain or winner that takes everything. It's more of kind of a technology
goes every it's a patchwork where everything kind of connects together. And the best
technologies and the best players are going to rise to the top over the next few years. I do
think it's going to get harder and harder to break into this space as as things change in this new
chapter. And I think that there's going to be more and more niche areas where people are exploring
that, you know, weren't really thought about in the years past, because it's just going to get a
lot more. Right, right. So you're sort of on the mind that I guess time, it'll take time. But once,
I guess, much like the internet, once people realize they can't live without it, or they don't even
realize that they're living with it, but but look back and say, Oh, like, that makes XYZ a lot
easier and a lot quicker than, than it's going to be hard to say, you know, it's hard going to be
hard to ban it or, you know, to restrict it, which I think right now is, is the goal of some of these
politicians. I heard you talk about proof of stake, which is what Ethereum blockchain obviously runs
on, you know, as a proof as opposed to proof of work, which Bitcoin runs on. There's some, there's
some of the mind that because of Ethereum's move to proof of stake, that it makes them much more
like security than it may have before. The big question now, I think, you know, what's next for
the industry after? Well, I guess the industry as it as it relates to the trap by industry, right?
What's the next thing? Obviously, it's well, will the SEC approve an Ethereum spot ETF? You know,
this year is obviously the question, the main question, but also ever, I think ever, they
probably will one day most likely, but, but we know we know we have a pretty hostile chairman at
the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commission Gary Gensler, even though he was the deciding vote
that that pushed through the launch of the Bitcoin spot ETF. Now, I feel like Ethereum is just sort
of a different animal when it comes to Gensler, because we've seen him many congressional hearings
refuse to say whether he thinks Ethereum is a security or commodity. And I feel like maybe he
doesn't want to actually admit what he thinks or sort of allow an Ethereum spot ETF to go forward
with the understanding that, you know, if it does, it's most likely going to be assumed a commodity.
So I'm wondering what your take on that is, like the there's a deadline in May, for I believe it's
ARC 21 shares application, they have to decide by then. And if they're going on precedent, or, you
know, by blueprint on what happened with the Bitcoin spots, they'll approve or deny, but they'll, you
know, if they approve, they'll likely approve a lot of them at once. What's your prediction, I guess?
What's the what's the marginal prediction for what's going on with the Ethereum spot? Will we
see one this year? Will we have to wait until Gary Gensler is out of SEC office? Will it take
another will take a switch in the White House? Like, what are your what are your predictions for
the Ethereum spot? So my first, the first thing I'll say is I think that Gary is a Bitcoin
maximalist, right? It all makes sense if you view it through that lens, because then it's like, oh,
he hates everything but Bitcoin. Okay, sense. So I suspect that. But that's just my hunch.
What I think in terms of Ethereum and ETFs as well, you know, if it's declared a security, then,
you know, it will be traded on, supposedly, Prometheam or whatever, right? But I don't,
I don't think that's the case. It I'm not a securities lawyer, but I don't view Ethereum
as a security. I don't buy it with any expectation of value. And when you're staking, you are
validating blocks in the network. So it's very similar to Bitcoin mining is the Bitcoin mining
hardware you bought a security because you are expecting to make some money off of that, right?
And it's not right. So I do believe that it will get approval. It might take it might be two years
from now after 2026, when there's a there's a change at the SEC. So it might take a little
while. And I don't think if it does take a little while, that's a bad thing. Crypto has its exposure
through Bitcoin. And by Bitcoin, having its ETF, Wall Street has already opened a bridge into
blockchain and crypto, it would just be one more extra bridge. I think it will eventually happen.
Um, I think that there's a there's a misconception that, you know, that you can take cryptos,
crypto currencies and, you know, turn them off after 6pm, or turn them off on the weekend,
just doesn't work that way. Of course, there's after hours trading. But the thing is crypto is
such a different animal that I don't think that it's going to work under the old frameworks,
maybe in some ways it will. But for the most part, it's a completely different animal, I can't take
my shares out of Robin Hood and send them to you in a non custodial way. Right. And that's a
technology of blockchain crypto. So it will it definitely will change. I do think it's coming,
it might take two years. One of the things I will say is that if we get Biden again,
I think we're really going to be set back in the world of crypto. It's very clear that his
administration, you know, doesn't want crypto to grow. And I wonder why, you know, where's all
this money going? What if you could trap and trace all of it? It would be very bad for the
politicians that are playing games. And I think there are a lot of politicians that are playing,
maybe almost all of them, right? But there are definitely good ones. I think that I think that
the transparency of the blockchain digital identity, that's what a lot of there are a lot
of people that fear that. And they will, they will, it's funny, because it's the, you know,
pot calling the kettle black, you know, oh, it's used for money laundering, it's, you know,
it's used to hide the tracing, hide the, you know, trail of funds, oh, like they're doing
the people, most of the people screaming the loudest about it and giving all the misinformation
about it are the perpetrators. That's the reality. Sorry to be, you know, so intense about that. But
I do feel that way. I do think that I do think that with the right leadership in America,
it will flourish. And ultimately, I like to call it Pandora's box, because now that we have crypto,
you can't go back. You can't say, you know, and you saw this over the past couple of years where
elected representatives will say things like, can we just shut it off? Can we just turn it off?
Okay, if you want to turn off the entire internet, but then you're going to have bigger problems.
Right. And so we have to figure out how to responsibly regulate it, how to, how to put it
integrated into our existing system, and how to put safeguards in place that protect
the American public. So I do think you'll see an Ethereum ETF at some point. I do believe that you
will see crypto integrated into banks. And I do believe you also have securities tokenized on
blockchain. Ultimately, I think that the securities exchanges will probably run on some
form of private and hybrid public networks. And things are going to change over the next 20 years
in ways that we couldn't imagine, right? And this is why NASDAQ and ICE and exchanges have
invested big into blockchain and the banks, because they know that it's going to change.
And you do have an old guard that's fighting it. But in most cases, it goes back to kind of like
the Think and Diamond example, they're not fighting it because they hate it. They're trying
to buy time, right? They will reverse when you can hold the Bitcoin cost in their bank account,
or the tokenized securities on their securities exchange. But for now, you are going to have
these people fighting it. And it might take two years, it might take till after Gary's out of
office. Like I said, I think that he's a closet Bitcoin maximalist. And when you view it that way,
it makes sense. So in that case, he would hate Ethereum. And that would make sense if he was a
maximalist. But Ethereum is where all the innovation and crypto is happening right now. That's where
it sprung out of all the DeFi smart contracts and everything, and has been replicated a million times
over between L1s and L2s and L0s. Now there's even talk of L3s and things like that. I think that
there's going to be a lot of innovation that's going to come out of crypto. And I think that
Bitcoin will even probably follow in those footsteps as well. And at some point, you'll
probably see smart contracts on Bitcoin. You'll probably see a change in the consensus and the
way the technology works. We can't keep, you know, somebody asked me about proof of work and renewable
energy. Renewable energy makes up about approximately 6% of the world's energy.
Bitcoin is approaching 1%. What happens if Bitcoin goes above 6%? Then the renewable energy
argument is out the window because, yeah, it uses all the renewable energy, right? So we can't keep
scaling proof of work at this rate. And, you know, there are people that will say, oh, it's not for
payments anymore. Bitcoin is not for payments. Well, then what is it for? Is it for store of
value? Is it for these other things? I think ultimately, crypto is kind of like water. It's
going to go to the path of least resistance and you won't be able to stop it no matter what.
It will evaporate. It'll flow straight through the rock. It's Pandora's box. It's inevitable.
Yeah, no, I love that analogy. I think I heard you say that you, I mean, because there's sort of two
schools of thought here. Like one is that, you know, crypto should be able to be, you know,
integrated, which I think your argument is right. You know, from, from sort of like, from your point
of view, like Metallica's view is that crypto digital assets should help complement the
traditional banking system or the traditional financial system. Mike, I wonder, like, are these,
you know, I think a lot is writing, we talk about regulation and Congress, a lot is writing on these
bills, these two bills, stablecoin bill and the fit for the 21st century act, because that, that
the latter is going to be the first sort of blueprint for any kind of regulatory structure
that digital assets could have. And I think the two, it would sort of split the jurisdiction between
the SEC and the CFTC. So, I mean, do you think that can we fit, like what the digital asset
industry is, can we fit that into these sort of these, these, these regulations between the SEC
and the CFTC? Or will there have to be some sort of, you know, maybe not a new agency, but like a
subset of the SEC or the CFTC that deals specifically with digital assets? Because I keep, you know,
I keep hearing people refer to, you know, the square peg round hole, right? Like crypto is a
square peg, trying to fit into the round hole of traditional finance, or at least the round hole of
traditional finance, traditional finance is regulatory system. You know, we hear Gary Gensler
all the time say, the laws are clear, they were written in 1933 and 1934. Well, it's, we're pushing,
you know, that's, that's, that's 90 years ago. And this technology certainly was not, you know,
in the minds of those who created the laws back then. So is it, is it going to be able to sort of
fit? Or are we going to make it fit? Or is it going to have to be something where it's a little bit
different, where we have to sort of reimagine that, that regulatory thing that everybody has
been following for the last 90 years? Yeah, you know, it's interesting, if you hear some of
Gensler's MIT speeches about crypto, when he first started lecturing, he did a complete 180,
right before he got an office, right? He said, most of these cryptocurrencies are, are not
securities, and they're probably commodities. And then as he's going into the SEC, he's like, oh,
nope, they're all securities, because I want to regulate and control everything, right,
in the crypto world. I got a chance to sit down a few years back with Dawn Stump, a former
CFTC commissioner. And this was just a casual chat. But I told her that, you know, I believe
that crypto spot and future markets should belong to CFTC. So the CFTC historically handles all the
futures trading, right? But I believe that's that the CFTC should also handle the spot,
it doesn't make sense to try and mislabel things and put them, you know, the square peg, the real
square peg in a round hole is trying to say commodities are securities, right? And so,
you know, I told her, you know, you haven't, we haven't seen this yet. But I believe that the SEC
and CFTC are going to have a big fight over this, who controls these markets, who regulates these
markets. And I believe that it belongs to the CFTC. And not only futures, but you should add
an S in there, the CSFTC, because it should be for or maybe the CCSFTC for the cryptocurrency spot
and futures. Right? Because too many, I believe that that's the case. Yeah, too many letters,
right? But um, you know, she laughed, and she's like, Oh, it's a really novel, you know, theory,
an idea. And then you have the current commissioner come out and, and chastise the SEC and say even as
far as going as far to say it's un-American, the way that the SEC has treated cryptocurrency. So I
do think that we're I don't, I don't think that we necessarily need more bureaucracy and another
organization to regulate it. I think that a lot of it is, well, there are crypto securities, of
course, right? And they can move back and forth between commodities and securities. But I don't
think it's that complicated. The one thing that's that is confusing is traditionally the spot
markets for commodities is regulated by the Department of Agriculture. So it wouldn't make
sense for Department of Agriculture probably to regulate cryptocurrencies. And that's why I think
it'll fall on the CFTC. And I hope that it does, because I think that they seem much more well
equipped to regulate it. And I think the SEC is well equipped to enforce the securities violations
and things like that. But I believe ultimately, you will see a battle between these two agencies
for regulatory control of spot markets. Futures markets are already clearly in the CFTC's domain,
but I think that spot markets will fall under it too at some point. Or, you know, we could have a
whole new entity. But I think, you know, what the U.S. needs right now is less bureaucracy and less
government spending. And so hopefully that, you know, is what happens. Yeah, I feel like the big
question mark for for a long time, but especially now, I mean, when you've got you mentioned
Prometheium with companies like that coming out and essentially self-declaring tokens like
Ethereum to be digital asset securities, which, you know, seems to be a term that sort of they
alone use because I don't really think that, I mean, obviously there's been no legislation,
there's been no sort of movement from either Congress or the SEC to classify specific tokens,
aside from Bitcoin, of course, as, you know, either securities or not. I'm curious what your
take on Prometheium is. I'm not asking you to, you know, you don't have to go into like all this
specific detail about them if you don't want to. But I think we all know that, you know, they're
sort of an anomaly because they're this entity that's declaring things that they believe to be
digital asset securities to trade on their platform. And, you know, they say they're members
of SIPIC or, you know, they are actually members of SIPIC, but SIPIC itself doesn't actually cover,
you know, digital asset securities because it doesn't fall into the definition of what a
traditional security is. So there's so much like semantics and disconnects around it. It's just
like, it's so hard to kind of know who thinks what. So, you know, in terms of Prometheium, like,
what's your sense there of them? And where will this go for them? Because I feel like they've
got a plan or, you know, they've got a vision that they're trying to fill. And it just seems
to be unfolding at a time when just nobody really knows what's going on at all.
Yeah, you know, to me, it looks like Prometheium kind of slid in through some sort of backdoor
deal. Nobody really knows who they are. They don't really have any live products in production. And
all of a sudden, they're winning these, you know, huge contracts, or not contracts, but they're,
you know, getting approved, essentially, you know, to have this regulatory moat around them.
You know, I think it's classic government corruption, I'll be honest, I think that
there should be a lot more that should be approved. And it's very bizarre and strange
that such a small unknown firm gets the approval. I think that there will be many that go, I mean,
obviously, you're going to have the black rocks, you're going to have the, you're going to have
large funds coming in offering and securities exchanges offering these things. Why hasn't,
why doesn't NASDAQ, why are they not the first one, right? So I think that there's definitely
issues there. It probably will be a while before we see that, because there's been a lot of
resistance in terms of the approvals, as you can see. Yeah, I guess just one word corruption.
It's this Lickback guy, it's Lickback hair guy, talking about his approval that of his company
that no one's ever heard of in crypto, because it's corrupt. And there should be many that approval,
but there's just that one. So I think a lot of things are going to have to change in government
over this year to really push crypto in the right direction. But I do think that
most of the top cryptos, major cryptos, whether it's proof of work or proof stake,
most of all of them fall into that commodities basket. And I think that the spot and the futures
go hand in hand, because you probably want the same regulator who's regulating the futures market
to also be watching the spot markets. It's very, very bizarre and strange to break those two up
when they're so tightly tied together. I think that, you know, as banks and payment institutions
begin to integrate things like metal blockchain, stablecoins, like XMD, you know, things like
Circle, USDC, those start to become native parts of the banking and payment infrastructure,
you're going to see more and more utility and usage. And people just are not going to be
really supportive of the overly burdensome regulation. Our crypto, our sector and cryptocurrency
obviously vary against heavy handed regulation. But I think when the public's going back to what
I said earlier, when the public sees that value, they're going to feel the same way. And, you know,
when I see, for example, like Elizabeth Warren talking about, you know, Dean and the campaign
about him challenging her, she's nervous, right? Look at the reply, like, look at the replies
under her tweets. There's no one supporting that. There's no one, you know, it gets traction in
Washington, because that's a game behind closed doors where you can, you know, play these political
games. But I think as as this space opens up more to the public, and people want more opportunities
for improving their business, faster payments, access to these markets, you know, people will
just demand it. It's just a matter of time. And, you know, the past, you know, couple years, we were
in a downturn in a bear market. And now people are getting excited about crypto. And it's a completely
different ballgame. And I think that people like Dean are going to give her a real run for her money,
because there's just not, that's not what the American people want. Clearly not. You know,
we've got how many cryptocurrency users at this point are we approaching? Are we over 100 million
yet? We're getting there, right? There's only 8 billion people in the world. At some points,
we'll just quickly cross over that billion, 2 billion threshold, everybody will be using it.
And when you look at the developing world, you look at, for example, what's going on in Nigeria,
Nigerian government is terrified of what's happening with crypto, because it's exposing
citizens to the US dollar and to Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies. And it's actually helping the
small business there. And the government is trying to put a clamp down on it, because,
you know, they used to extract so much money out of the people and not for the right reasons. And
that's why people are pushing against it. But you're going to see it all over the world. People
pushing for crypto, getting excited about it. And in the next five years, it will be ubiquitous,
right? You'll, you'll log into your bank, you'll have a, you know, metal blockchain inside,
or you'll have a circle inside, or you'll have even CBDC. And people won't even think about it,
you know, the next generation is going to view that as the future cash, it will be like looking
at vinyl records or eight tracks or VHS and being like, does anyone know what this is? Oh,
yeah, it's a paper dollar. Yeah, my father, my grandfather had one, some of those, right?
That's what's going to happen.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's a great segue to I think I'm, I could talk to you for hours, Marshall,
and I have so many more questions, but in the interest of of time, and obviously our
your time and our audience's time, I'm going to pivot a little bit just to, to metallic us and,
and some metal pay. Specifically, I know you guys have launched a couple of new initiatives lately,
but if you want to just give like sort of an overview, I know you did obviously in the
beginning about the company, but the team covering the metal blockchain and working on the metal
blockchain, it's obviously it's no easy feat to take on the banking industry, obviously, you know,
Elizabeth Warren is living proof of that. But as a private company, as a, you know,
crypto centric private company trying to, you know, trying to, to not take on the banks like
in a negative way, but to, to partner with them and try and get a seat at their table.
It's, it's difficult. It's probably one of the most difficult industries, you know, in,
in finance. So, so tell me a little bit about what the team is doing and,
and how metal is sort of making those inroads.
Yeah, you know, we're, we're really excited about what we've built with metal blockchain,
we're about to really come out of the shadows with that we, like you said in the beginning,
we kind of build quietly, we look into the future with a vision of where will things be in 20 years
and we start building towards that. And we're really excited about we built an amazing team,
amazing advisors, over 25 years of banking experience on our executive team and board.
Actually, I think it's even more if you combine the board. And, you know, we've hired some of the
best Donald Burke, our CEO, comes from Northern Trust Bank, and Lee Woolley comes from BNY Mellon
Arena, has experience with IPOs and has worked in crypto and traditional finance with an auditing
and accounting background. Myself, I'm obviously, you know, just super deep crypto guy. But, you
know, what's really exciting is, as we started to build this platform, we realized there's a big
need for faster payments. Yeah, we've got FedNow coming. Yeah, we have other solutions. There's
SWIFT, there's all different types of stuff. But where crypto can really revolutionize banking and
finance is to connect all the banks. And we're way behind in the United States. When you look at what
they have in Europe, when you look at what they have in China and Asia, it's so much faster,
so much more efficient. And the US has always been very pro industry, American industry. So it makes
sense that crypto companies will offer private solutions. For us, our vision was, you know,
it doesn't make sense that banks are going to integrate layer one chains, because there's so
much stuff that's out of their hands with a layer one chain, a hard fork, you know,
malicious smart contract, things like that. And they first looked at private networks like
Hyperledger and Corda and things like this and realized, oh, we don't need that because the whole
value of this thing was connecting each other in the first place. So with Metal Blockchain,
we forked Avalanche and we looked at the ability to have subnets as banks having their own private
and public chains. And we really hit it off with that. When we went to banks and we said, hey,
we can help you build a blockchain, we can help you build a stable coin, and we can put it on a
private network that connects the public networks, but you have all the control in your network and
it's branded, it really hit off. I think where other blockchain said, hey, come and build on
our blockchain, it's like there's just too many variables that we can't wrap our head around that.
But if there was a blockchain that we could deploy on and have our, you know, the consensus
part is handled by a company that understands all this stuff, then that's one piece of the puzzle.
The other part of the puzzle that not a lot of people talk about is the digital identity and how
that's going to play into integrating banks and payment institutions. Because without the digital
identity, you can't have a regulated platform. So that's going to be a really big thing. And we've
been spending a lot of time at Metal building that out. We're about to make a big announcement on
some of the technology that we've built around that. And, you know, when we go and talk to
our partners and potential partners and we show them that, they say, wow, I've never seen that
before. Never really seen any blockchain or technology that has something like that.
And that's, that's where I think it takes off. You know, when you're at Elena on the blockchain,
and I can just type your name out, I can see a little checkmark in my bank. You know,
when I send a wire, if I were to send a wire to you right now from my bank to your bank,
I don't see that it's your bank. I don't see a profile photo or verified thing. How do I even
And so that shift and change in allowing all the banks to communicate and to work
faster together and to have that instant settlement. And I'm not talking about like
Zelle, where they have to put up all the money and settle it on their own,
but a system that truly connects the banks. And when something goes wrong,
how do you notify from one bank to the other bank when all that stuff can be done on chain and done
instantly? That's, that's a huge success. So we're really excited about it. I you know,
I think we've, we've established, you know, numerous banking relationships, from credit
unions with over a billion AUM to smaller niche regional banks and even larger top banks that we
were that we've been talking with. Um, it really is taking off. And, you know, as our partners have
seen the potential where this can go, we just keep getting deeper and deeper into building these
customized solutions. And I'm really excited to soon roll some of them out. So you have to stay
tuned for that. But yeah, it's just a really exciting time. And anybody that said that banks
and blockchain can't coexist is, is not, they're wrong. You actually answered my next question,
which was along the lines of you kind of rattled off there in the beginning, the execs that you
have working on your team who were actually, you know, former banking professionals. And,
and my question was going to be sort of like, is there excitement? Like, do they, you know,
are they excited to come over? Did they, I mean, they must be because they wouldn't have come over
if they didn't see the potential in, in, in making the switch. But I'm reminded of, I went to the
Miami ETF conference last week. And on the Bitcoin spot panel, one of the panelists was a, you know,
he was a, he was a trapify guy for a long time. And then he made the switch to, to the crypto
industry. And he's like, people called me crazy. You know, this was like a couple years ago, maybe
like 20, 2018, 2019. He's like, people called me crazy. They said it wouldn't work. It wouldn't
last. And he's like, now, you know, he's like, he's like, I have the last laugh because you know,
I'm, I'm one of the, I'm part of one of the companies that was launched one of the first,
you know, the inaugural Bitcoin spot ETFs. And, and I just feel like, you know, there's a lot of
similar sentiment there where it's like people, people come over from trapify and they see the
success and they see the, the good things the industry is doing. And it sounds like, you know,
metal pay is not an exception to that rule. So that's really, really cool. I do want to ask you
about the, and sort of in the same vein, right? Like you have a, a new, it's a banking innovation
program. Is that, is that sort of like, is that working with banks for more like education and
sort of like excitement around like the products you're launching? Can you just describe that a
little bit more? Yeah. So, you know, the first part of that too, we've had amazing talent join us
from the, from the banking world. And we keep getting more and more people coming over and
applying for roles and looking at it. And it's because it's, it's not only exciting, but as a
company, metallic is we're delivering where, you know, there's a lot of companies out there that
promise and say, oh, I'm going to do X, Y, and Z and face whatever fad. But as a company, we keep
delivering and we're building the right things. And it may not be as visible in the public,
but it's making waves in the banking world. And it's really exciting to get that, that, that
talent. And a lot of people that I'm, I really look up to and I'm learning from, you know,
internally in the company. And hopefully I can teach them some things about crypto as well. And,
and I am. So in terms of, you know, where things are going with the banking innovation program,
what we, what we found was when we started approaching banks to, you know, to basically
sell our services and what we're building around metal blockchain, there was a lot of confusion
and there was a lot of education that had to be done. And so we spent a lot of time educating
different executives inside the banks and, and explaining how different things worked.
And some would show up with, you know, ideas for proof of concepts they want to build, or,
you know, we want, this is the technology that we want, but a lot would show up with,
this is really interesting. I've heard a lot of buzz about this. Tell me more. And so in creating
the banking innovation program, we recognize that, you know, there's a lot of education,
there's a lot of stuff out there, there's a lot of misinformation, frankly, out there. And so we've
invited banks and credit unions to come in and work with us. And before we even, you know, start
building anything, let's show you guys what crypto is all about. Let's show the executives
in the banking world where this technology can be implemented and can really benefit the customers,
where it's safe and secure. It can provide better security even, right? You look at like when I try
to log in my bank, you should never be getting a text message. This is where blockchain makes a
lot of sense, right? Doing that authentication and digital identity and these things. So, you know,
with the banking innovation program, we've invited banks in the US and globally to come and work
with us. And we are basically offering kind of seminars or teaching them about different aspects
of blockchain, how proof of work works, how proof of stake, you know, where is digital identity today
and what have we built. And with almost every bank that comes into the program ends up becoming
a customer and metallic is because they see, oh, wow, this this is all a lot of the things that I
thought it could be. But there were just so few available solutions. And there was no one that
really explained it very well. Everyone's out there in the crypto world trying to sell these
shovels and different things, but no one's explaining them. And so that was where Frank
Mazza, our director at metal blockchain, that's where he came up with the director product and
metal blockchain. That's where he came up with that idea, because we would go and pitch a bank
and then spend a month or two months educating them and showing them. And so when we opened up
the innovation program, we got all these banks signing up because it was like, oh, everyone else
wanted to just get as quickly into selling me something as fast as they could. Whereas how does
it really work? How does it value? How does it impact our bank in a positive way in our customers?
How does it improve the security time to transfer ability to, for example, just simply buy and hold
Bitcoin? How would how would that enable us to do it safely? Right. And as they see that we we've
converted a lot. And I think it's it's a good program. Frank had the right idea because we were
spending so much time kind of, you know, doing one off meetings. And then we're like, hey, let's just
bring everybody together in one room. We can do a like a class. And it's been great.
Awesome. This is why I like you, Marshall. You're a crypto guy at heart. But you're also very much
a realist. And those things aren't always mutually exclusive. So, you know, I think this has been a
really enlightening conversation. Thank you so much, everybody who's tuned in. It's been an hour,
we've gone over an hour. And let's do this again soon. And with that, Marshall, thank you. And
I'll hand it back over to Will. Thank you so much, Eleanor.
I think Will's on listener mode. But yeah, I just want to say thank you, Eleanor. Thank you, Will,
and everyone for coming out here today. It's been an awesome space. I saw there's several hundred
people. All right. Thank you, everyone. It's been a fantastic space. And stay tuned for some features.
Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Will. Thanks, Eleanor. Have a great day.