Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Digital Asset Treasuries: Billions to Trillions? 💰 The Aggregated Ep. 131
Recorded: Sept. 26, 2025 Duration: 2:23:30Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion on digital asset treasuries, industry leaders explore the potential for significant growth in the crypto space, driven by innovative projects and strategic partnerships. As companies increasingly adopt cryptocurrencies, the conversation highlights both the opportunities and challenges posed by financialization and market volatility.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Music . Thank you. . Thank you. Music Thank you. . Thank you. gm gm everyone
there we go gm aztec
jim yeah jim jim
good to hear all your guys your voices
hello richard you're here man are you
how are you awake isn't it like 12 in Korea yeah yeah this proves you never
sleep yeah that's like prime Richard you must be an AI good times guys i'm ready to get this started episode 131 digital asset treasuries
billions to trillions it's a question we're going to dive deep into dats and treasuries and
funds and it's going to be a good conversation today can't wait to pick everyone's brain
on the panel here thank you to everyone that has joined us rock is not here today he's uh
he's busy networking in korea and uh heard that richard and rock are having a great time out
there making a lot of connections and doing a lot of good work so um everyone wish him well
i'll just we are going to go ahead and just go ahead and say the word libertarian so that everyone
is that it's out there it's it's done um we don't need to say it again for the rest of the spaces
what's the internal game like is it a shot every time he says it? Yeah. We try to time it to see
how soon Rock will say Libertarian.
We time it.
He actually was bidding
on auction so that
he could get the
handle Libertarian.
So he could have
the domain name.
There's no way
we could do a drinking game.
Even as a Scotsman, I wouldn't last.
That's saying a lot.
Good times, man.
Well, thank you to QuickSwap.
All the hard work that they do to make this show possible.
Also, Polygon.
A good friend who sent Timmy from polygon shout out to you
uh darren here behind the quick swap account nerd girl as well and marshall and everyone
that contributes thank you so much so let's go ahead and jump in the way i like to do it is i just go left to
right and uh introduce everyone first and then we jump into the dynamic conversation where i'll ask
questions and you don't have to raise your hand on this show just piggyback off each other it's
like a bunch of friends around a big table but But first, let's introduce everyone. Nerd Girl, are you going to co-host with me?
Yeah, I am. I'm here. I'm ready. Let's go.
Let's do it. Let's do it. You got to wake me up. Throw in some elbows if you need to and
help me lead the show today since Rock's not here. All right. I'm going to go left to right here. So Kurt, welcome back to the show. Please take 30 seconds to introduce yourself and then we'll pass the mic.
Bitcoin history for media and financial entities.
I also run a mining operation called Gorilla Pool, and we host HX for people across two countries.
My background is cybersecurity, and I've been a Bitcoiner since 2012.
I'm happy to chat anything Bitcoin history, Bitcoin tech.
I have a software background, too, so I'm pretty well versed across a lot of things.
I'm very happy to be back. I've been sick for most of the last six weeks.
I got COVID about a month and a half ago and then I've been working on getting my voice back.
So hopefully it lasts.
Well, you sound really good and I'm happy to hear that you got over that.
I've heard that it's kind of rearing its ugly head again and um so really happy that you're better thank you it wasn't so like i didn't get the fever like
it wasn't nasty nasty but just persistent cough and my voice is gone which sucks because i'm a broadcaster. What a voice to lose.
Yeah, you're telling me.
Right, and every time you come on,
you have so many great insights,
so I'm really happy you're here today
to chop it up with us.
But yeah, thanks for being here.
I'll go ahead and pass the mic on over to Zane.
What's up, Legend?
Sorry, I'm just unmuting there. Morning, guys. Yeah, appreciate the opportunity to speak today.
So I'm Zane Callian, Executive Director of Luxfolio Holdings, which is the first
Litecoin digital asset treasury company based in Canada. We're very proud to have the direct support of the Litecoin
Foundation and Charlie Lee and David Schwartz on our advisory board. But yeah, really happy
to be here and kind of shop with you guys. I think the topic today is perfectly aligned
with what we do. And as always, it's always a great, great forum to kind of chat and connect
um as always it's always a great great forum to kind of to chat and connect with you guys
with you guys.
definitely as a light corner i can't wait to pick your brain on you know the future of dats
and and all of that in a second here so much love thank you for being here thanks for having me
definitely i will see to your direct right is token metrics who from token metrics is here
i love you guys hey as they guys are going it's tough here from token metrics we're an
i-driven crypto analytics platform that ultimately help traders and investors make smart decisions
haven't done a space in a while so So yeah, it should be exciting. Exciting, looking forward to this.
Definitely.
Great to have you here. And, uh, I've used token metrics many times throughout the years.
I think I need to re subscribe, but I've used it for a long time and love the
insights and that's great.
It's good.
And, uh, that's great, but that's great.
Yeah.
I'm excited about this coming up and, uh, yes, looking good. That's great. That's great. Exciting updates coming up. And yes, looking good.
Awesome. Awesome.
All right. Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to Tokos.
Hi, everyone.
Thank you for having us here.
And I'm DeFi Grandad.
And I'm speaking on behalf of Douglas today. We are a
credit lending on Somnia launched like just yesterday yeah so we acquired a
freshman but so far we currently are aiming to be top one credit lending on
Somnia and we have really nice relationship with Quick Club so thank
you for inviting us.
Uh, would be really interesting to discuss the currently existing topic.
Uh, because yeah, it's actually a trillion industry.
So happy to be here.
Well, they'll bullish you are.
Love how bullish you are. I agree.
I it's a big part of my my thesis you know that's the
institutional money that's in going to also flow in and uh can't wait to pick your brain about it
as well thanks for being here you you always uh i think last week you were here as well and i
loved the conversation with you yeah thank you actually, we have really nice connection with you guys. And I appreciate your invites always, because so far, the aggregated is one of the best podcasts and spaces where I've been. So you're doing a really good job.
I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. We just like to have a fun time and and we're always
discussing different topics we're here every friday and um i think being that i'm the cso
at lunar digital assets which is our full stack blockchain venture studio and talking to so many different teams. We have a really good understanding much of the industry,
and we have so many friends around,
so it's fun just to bring everyone into one place,
network together, connect people live on the show,
and discuss these really interesting topics.
So, yeah, really awesome to have you here.
I got to pass the mic on over to my good friend, Joel. What's up, bro?
Joel is rugged.
It's too early to be rugged. No.
Really ironic that it's you that's saying rugged. No. Really ironic
that it's you that's saying that.
I know, right?
Yeah, right.
Actually, I think last episode
I was rugged at the very beginning already.
Usually, guys,
I get rugged
about two to three times
every show.
So if I just disappear...
Joel, are you there?
Yeah, can you hear me?
There we go.
Yeah, sorry.
I just had to switch.
I'm glad I jumped on both accounts because it's
been so bad like listen why can't we get internet to work or spaces to work yeah
that's it's just X bro probably yeah so just the quick intro I'm Joel I run
business development and marketing for dash which is a good digital currency
for making your everyday payments and stuff. If you're on the Brave browser today, by the way, open a
new tab and tell me what you see. I'm always very happy to be here. And thanks, everyone,
for having me. I'm more than happy to promote this space, especially because it kind of
got me inspired to start our own space that we do every Thursday. And so the more cross-sharing
that we do every Thursday.
And so the more cross-sharing between the two, the better.
between the two, the better.
Definitely.
Definitely.
We love your show.
Everyone that's following here, listening in today,
definitely follow Joelle, follow Dash.
They have amazing spaces every week.
And it's always great to have you on the show.
You really make me think
and you have some really, really profound points
that you make every time.
So yeah, much love to Will.
Let's see, Nerd Girl, please introduce yourself.
Hey, I'm Nerd Girl 007.
My name is Nicole.
I've been in crypto. I think I've been working full-time
in crypto for eight years. Started as a journalist. Still do some journalism, some research and
strategy and stuff like that. But I also now work in PR and strategy at LDA. And I help produce the
Dash Space with Joelle. And I do a few other crypto-related jobs too.
Thanks for having me.
Definitely.
And I'm happy you're here since, you know,
Rock's not here and I know just in case I get rugged,
like I was saying, you're going to help carry the show.
So much love it.
Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately. uh you're gonna help carry the show so that's not an essence
yeah yeah unfortunately thank you for saying it again richard all right richard you you introduce yourself and then we'll introduce cedra and then alex and then we're going to jump into
the combo uh yeah hey everybody i'm richard uh chief of staff with lunar digital assets
uh and events coordinator um yeah just really excited to be here especially about this topic
on dats i mean it is super super hot i am also out here in korea and also headed to singapore
soon but what i've been doing lately is coordinating a ton of uh dat panels so um it's definitely
something that people are highlighting and people want to hear about so yeah this is this is perfect
great to have you here bro and i agree this is uh such a big topic and
a lot of people are still trying to figure out that
you know what what does it mean for them how do they get involved uh what's the long-term vision
so we're going to definitely dive into all that today let's go ahead and uh pass the mic on over
to cedra gm i'm ryan community contributor from cedra cedra cedra is the first community on
blockchain protocol
built using the Move programming language.
Community for everyone, essentially.
With that, I think my personal discords
and some of our group chats have been on fire with that.
But because it seems so new as both a concept
and the fact that the word trillions is being thrown around
and that excites pretty much everybody,
especially with all this capital due to come on chain,
it's a very interesting time for this conversation conversation to take place so i hope to be a
part of it definitely yeah i've seen a recent stat showing that i think it was i forget which quarter
but it was already you know so many tens of billions of dollars that have come into crypto through dats and
trillions is right around the corner of course but definitely great to have you here um let's go
ahead and pass the mic on over to alex yo gm everyone great to have you back thank you thank
you it's uh it's just me or every time you speak your voice gets deeper
and i like it
oh no oh no yeah no it's just it's probably because i i just woke up and yeah i don't i don't mean to
to scare you bro no that's okay that's a commands uh domination anyway uh yeah so I'm Alex actually my background is in I used to work in Airlines and but now I'm in crypto for the last five years been doing this
and that uh I'm doing marketing NVIDIA at Lingo a very simple concept you can stake our tokens with rolex or other cool prices
and looking for cool partnerships but this topic is something which to be honest i didn't know the
existence of the world of dat i mean now i know i did my research but uh have some interesting
facts and stats that i found out during the day preparing for these spaces, but definitely looking to learn from you guys as well.
I love it. And thanks for joining us again.
You've been on many times and really appreciate joining us today.
And then I love to hear that you did some research.
So you're coming in with some things,
some different things you learned and
and yeah we're always learning we're learning together uh there's there's never especially in
this space things are moving so fast that we have to research every day you know just to stay up
with the new thing or the new strategy, the new technology.
100%. And it's good to be able to talk with all of you guys together,
all the experts here today.
So I think I got, Nerd Girl, did I get everyone?
I think I have introduced everyone.
Yeah, I think you have.
So we could do this.
Is there anybody who is in the speakers panel right now
who did not get a chance to introduce themselves?
I think you got it.
Oh, there you go.
Alex, did you not?
I thought you did.
No, I'm sorry.
Just send Timmy, but I'm not sure he will be able to.
The Polygon account.
Sorry, please go ahead.
Oh, yeah.
The Polygon account.
Oh, yeah.
Just send Timmy.
Do you want to say anything
we'll take that as a no
he's probably usually multitasking behind the accounting uh but yeah all right good times
guys let's jump into this so i like to start off and let's paint the picture for everyone listening
today maybe someone can jump in and just tell us what a digital asset treasury is just to start off
and then we'll jump into some meteor questions that'd be a good one for zane
definitely yeah no no totally appreciate that.
Yeah, so I'm pretty sure everyone has some familiarity
with what DATs are,
but functionally, they are publicly traded entities.
I guess you theoretically could have privately traded ones too,
but for the most part, let's just let's focus on the publicly traded entities that have a sole focus or primary focus of accumulating specific digital assets or
specific pools of digital assets. I think everyone's familiar with the most famous being
MicroStrategy and kind of being the pioneer in the space with the entire model. But over the past,
I'd say six months, realistically, but there's probably there was a couple of more even earlier
than that. But really, in the past six months, we've seen the space really heat up. And
this strategy of accumulation can take on varying forms. There's pure play operations or pure play DATS kind of, I would
like to say that Luxfolio is one of those where we're solely focused on Litecoin. But
also our model is, and our model thus far, I'm not to say that we may not change this
somewhat in the future, but at this stage is solely focused on issuing equity and then
leverage and then the equity we issue and the funds we get from receiving that equity we use to to accumulate Litecoin.
But in other models, there are some more creative structures out there.
And as with all financial engineering, it's kind of ironic because this is more TradFi financial engineering than it would be DeFi financial engineering.
that it would be DeFi financial engineering. You find these models where these DATs are
accumulating crypto and finding ways to accumulate crypto in more creative ways, leveraging debt
structures, leveraging structures that are collateralized against the digital assets
themselves. So yeah, that's that's functionally what they are. And I think I've always kind of felt a little
uncomfortable getting up there and being a big proponent of DATS, given the fact that I run one
and a founder of one. Just from the context that I do think there are a lot of arguments to say
that DATS do stand at odds with the core tenets of decentralization and really the benefits of crypto and why we're all here for that matter. But what I would say is that it's all stepping
stones. So we're in this place where every day we try and get closer and closer to mainstream
adoption or wide scale, large scale mainstream adoption of digital assets in our everyday lives. And to me,
that watermark or that benchmark really is when we see people using USDC1, but then Bitcoin and
Litecoin and call it true stores of value for everyday purchases. And that's in everyday
commerce. And I think USDC is kind of interesting because you're starting to see it being used in
international commerce on a day-to-day basis.
So this adoption of stablecoins, and then you're seeing USDT being used in developing markets for everyday payments.
So we're at a kind of a, what I'd say is a turning point for the industry. And the rise of DATS at that same time, I think just provides an opportunity
for the general TradFi investor to get exposure. But also, it's just about driving adoption.
Our core tenant at Luxfolio is to drive adoption of Litecoin. That is our focus. That is our
North Star. Making money for investors and providing a return on investment to our investors.
That's right there. And we believe the best way to do that is by driving adoption of Litecoin.
But what I'd say if with, I don't say all dads are created equal.
And I do have some trouble with some of the models that are being adopted. And
there obviously are some concerns with how this kind of moves forward. But
and then there is a level of hypocrisy. But I do have to believe that there are stepping stones to get to
the future that we want. And for us to see wide-scale adoption of digital assets, there are
going to be, these are necessary, I don't want to say evils, but necessary stepping stones,
necessary stopgaps to get there. We've got a whole bunch of questions about, you know,
a whole bunch of questions that I'm sure there will be lots of conversation about potential negative you know negative outcomes from having that so
i'm glad you're here to answer them and i was sure that joelle has some some counterpoints to make as
well definitely i definitely want to jump into that uh at some point at the at the top of this uh show
though zane you were talking about you know some of the strategies and so i mean this is for for
anyone that wants to jump in here uh but what type of strategies are that deploying what like what are DATS deploying? What makes them special
or hot because
of the strategies that they're deploying?
What makes it
interesting? I think
people are new to DATS,
they've probably heard of micro strategies
there's different
strategies that micro strategies has or strategy
is just called strategy now but but uh for everyone here that might not know what type
of strategies are you guys looking at uh that you've seen deployed and what what makes that
special yeah like maybe i'd say so like If in all of these, like financial engineering is all based around
and that extends from DeFi to TradFi, etc.
It all extends around trying to figure out
the most amount or figure out
how you can build the most amount of leverage
in the most creative,
what I'd say is probably not the goal,
but the most creative way possible.
And that's what a lot of these
like DeFi platforms end up doing.
And same thing in TradFi. And that's what the dads have done. So if you look at strategy as an
example, they've come up with a bunch of these novel concepts whereby they issue debt that's
secured against the assets that they use that they use the debt to buy. And it provides a yield to
the invest a passive yield to the investors. And then they hedge against that with their existing stack.
So it's very creative ways for the investor to be able to get further leverage on their dollar.
So rather than spending $1,000 to buy Bitcoin, that $1,000 worth of Bitcoin exposure actually becomes,
could be $5,000 or $6,000 or $7,000 worth of Bitcoin exposure by buying the debt.
And that's the counterpoint.
A lot of people say, well, what's the difference between a digital asset treasury and an ETF?
So I'd say the two arguments are ETFs are typically very passive.
They just buy the asset and they hold it.
They have very minimal fees.
The digital asset treasuries have varying models.
You have digital asset treasuries that have ridiculously high fees that make no sense.
You have digital asset treasuries that have ridiculously high fees that make no sense. You have digital asset treasuries that have very almost no overhead at all. The management team takes no salary like
Lexfolio, like where we're completely lean. And these varying models present different
opportunities to investors. But more than anything for as compared to call it a traditional ETF,
there is a level of leverage that allows the investor to get a higher level
of exposure to the digital asset they're focused on by investing in a DAT versus an ETF.
And one of the ways that we try to differentiate ourselves because we are very conservative
in how we invest, like we don't have any debt on our books, is we try to provide that existing
that additional leverage to the investor through other models,
namely trying to be a support for the community
and investing community projects.
And that provides a level of delta or upside
alongside the general yielding that we're doing as well.
And that yield increases the Litecoin per share
that we have on book as well.
Those two collect, those two things collectively
provide a more, from our perspective,
more conservative way of generating yield for the investors and generating an alpha on top of college, just the general net asset value of the Litecoin that we sit on.
That's a really comprehensive explanation.
Guys, please jump in after Zane here you know if you have any thoughts on uh on the question i just want to say how much i hate this business model
like there is a i mean like i get it like this is this is how the world has worked really since the founding of uh you
know these kind of mark probably the london or the the netherlands stock exchange but the problem
with it is you know we're ignoring so many fundamental principles of what bitcoin was
invented to do and it was a speed up small payments on the internet uh make them cheaper
to do and then also to get away from third party custodians. And like, you know,
I just, I just look at, you know,
what the technology is for and what it could do,
like what it could disrupt in business. And I just hear nothing but more like,
you know, well,
rapid derivative and another derivative and trust this partner and whatever.
And it's a leverage play. And you know know, like, that's, again, fine. Yeah, I've worked in financial markets, but like, it just, it just
strikes me as the next shiny thing that distracts from the fact that, you know, there's trillions
of dollars that are completely landlocked and locked up in the low levels of the economy, globally, especially. But it strikes me
as one more thing that guys from New York and London understand deeply and push out to people
that really just want to get ahead. And I understand that. Bitcoin has been very good to me,
so I'm not ungrateful. But I think about all the people that could be disrupted, that could have their lives changed because Bitcoin is a useful tool in their everyday life.
the all the financial uh financialization you know the word financialization has been used a
couple of times already and i think financialization in general is is just a way to get people to not
become entrepreneurs it makes people think that the way to get rich is to just start stacking
money into weird financial vehicles and then just wait and that can work but you have to have some
significant amount of capital to make that work in the first place and that can work, but you have to have some significant amount of capital to make that work
in the first place. And that significant amount of capital comes from typically hard work,
uh, you know, entrepreneurship and whatever. And I just, I feel like that gets so, so, so lost.
And then we're just stuck in the cycle of people, you know, ultimately cheerleading,
wrapping derivative assets, trusting custodians, which is again, like one of the most
important lessons is to not trust custodians with your money. Like this is what the technology
actually represents. And it's just, it's so lost. And then people, you know, people look at me like
I'm the crazy one. And it's like, come on guys, like this is, this is the opportunity of a
generation. And instead we're doing the same kind of stuff we've done for 500 years across
financial markets. It just, frankly, it bums me out.
It actually makes me legitimately sad,
but I also don't know what to do about it.
And yeah, I would totally agree.
I think I try to put that,
like everything you said totally speaks to me. I totally get the concern.
I don't want to say the tragedy of the fact that all of this capital that's been concentrated
in these entities could be going directly into adoption of digital assets and not these third-party custodian structures that really,
in 95, or let's say 75% of the cases don't actually serve any kind of benefit to the
community as a whole or to actually truly driving adoption.
They're purely just engines for speculation.
And this is like, I think this is also something that you've kind of seen throughout crypto
all the way back to, I'll call it 2017, is that you've kind of seen throughout crypto all the way back to call it 2017 is that
you've had these seasons of speculation you've had um you had nfts and then you had meme tokens
and then you had defi summer and and all of these things have been like use case of in general
adoption like the majority of volume that occurs in the digital asset space is focused around
speculation it's not focused around payments and general use case.
So I totally agree with you.
And then DATS are now just another manifestation of that.
And ironically, it's a manifestation that's stepped backwards rather than stepped forwards because it's not on chain, it's off chain.
But no, no, I totally agree.
But I think the necessary stepping stone piece is just,
this is a point, I think, a point in digital,
in the history of crypto and the history of digital assets
where you've seen the most amount,
you're the closest to the precipice of mainstream adoption.
And while I do agree with you that 75% of the time
these data just don't really serve a purpose,
I do think that there is a use case in the fact
that they do drive adoption and awareness.
And maybe that's kind of Hippocratic.
It's not necessarily the best way to do that,
but it is something that exists today.
And I think we just,
especially if I don't want to adopt it,
I think we are embracing it.
I think we are moving forward.
I think every day we get closer and closer
to the vision of what you kind of outlined there. Yeah, and I don't mean to be a jerk about it. I think we are moving forward. I think every day we get closer and closer to the vision of what you kind of outlined there. Yeah. And I don't mean to be a jerk about it. I'm
not calling anybody out. I think it's absurd to argue with momentum and the direction of markets.
So it's not what I'm saying. But at the same time, if we're trying to drive adoption, I think we're
genuinely driving adoption the wrong direction. It it really isn't different than buying, you know, like a bundle of real estates,
you know, real estate derivatives all bundled into a thing. Like it really is just the same
thing. It's just, you're, you're just picking some other thing and then making it a leverage
play against whatever that asset class is. And that is in and of itself. It's, it's, I mean,
it's not new,
it's not interesting. And then the people, the people that are participating in it,
they don't get any actual exposure to the real thing. I mean, it's, it's just like,
it's another line item on their portfolio that they send into their accountant at the end of
the year. And they're not, they're not using the tool. Like it is not something that they
have in their hands. It's not something they're using in their real life. And then they,
they come to believe that its purpose is simply to be that thing in their portfolio.
And that's it.
And to me, it's just, again, it's like the biggest shame I can think of in about the last 10 years, given the opportunity.
I mean, I think the opportunity to disrupt commerce is bigger than that of the internet.
to disrupt commerce is bigger than that of the internet. And just, it's talked about by like 50
people who, you know, just, uh, you know, seem crazy, you know, relative to the people that are
making tons of money just because it's a new sexy asset to put, uh, you know, as a portfolio piece.
And again, I don't mean this as a criticism to anybody in particular. I just, I think all of us
need to do better. Like this, this this it has to be actually useful i mean like
real estate at the very least people are living in houses right but with this stuff it's like
hey yeah well how much commerce is happening on you know on these like this thing that's holding
you know two three trillion dollars in in global market cap like well what's it being used for
where'd that two trillion come from and it's like oh it's just people holding on to it like that's that's 99 of it is just people speculating on it like oh well how new is it oh it's 15 years old
now and i don't know it just it just seems like a a disappointment but also the fact that there's
almost no fundamental use happening in the real economy makes me feel like it's a lot more risky
than people want to talk about. Well, Kurt, I like to play devil's advocate. You know that we,
every time we come on, I feel like we go back and forth a bit here and I love, uh, having different
viewpoints on this show. So, you know, great to have you here, uh in the play devil's advocate the dats what uh
what problem are they solving fi world and also um
helped on board and bring you know money into bitcoin and you know crypto and and so what what is the problem that's being
solved on the flip side yeah i understand their critiques but but maybe if someone wants to jump
in also i want to say um anthem welcome to the show uh great to have you back on the show and
joelle uh alex i see a bunch of hands up guys you don't have to uh throw your hands up just jump in i
think uh i think anthem you had your hand up first so just jump in but guys just say hey guys i was
trying to take that silly thing off hey thank you so much aztec and all of you and i resonate with
what everyone's saying i've been there i i led a company that launched a ethereum digital gold
token after we tried to launch a layer three
Bitcoin gold token that Financial Times covered a decade ago. And we successfully did have a
Bitcoin strategy because we raised about two thirds of the bank to the future Reg D 506C
exempt offering in BTC keys. And that actually led to another Ethereum utility key where we built a full stack DAP that was an inventory log for the digital gold token itself.
So I have a lot of empathy for everyone on both sides of this.
My view to keep it short and sweet is that treasury is important because of security and scale in that all of this quote-unquote hoarding and savings is basically to me
the biggest indicator of how massive the total available market is. We're literally replacing
all commercial constructs and it's due to an entire loss of confidence in administrative systems.
I'm talking not only directly marketplaces like nation states and
their proxies, corporations. I'm even talking religions and forced spiritualities as well.
All administrative states have lost confidence, and this is a total rebuild. So we're just really
early, I think, is my answer to that. Definitely early. Jump in, guys. Joelelle i see your hand up alex you had your hand up early
whoever wants to jump in i'll go in a little bit i have to say um i mostly go more in like the
kurt side of things while understanding um that things are not necessarily so black and white.
So we have at our fingertips, right, some of the most transformative technology we've
seen in like our lifetimes.
And unfortunately, what was that?
I'm sorry.
Can you repeat?
We have what again?
What is the technology that we have?
One of the most transformative technologies?
Am I audible to people?
Yeah, I'm sorry, sorry.
Please go ahead.
I hear you.
Hey, Nicole, say audible.
All right.
Jokes aside.
Audible.
There we go.
Perfect.
We're some of the most transformative technology we've ever seen.
And obviously there's tons of money to be made by using this tech in some way, shape or form.
It's so different from everything before it that it just the money isn't there immediately.
There's so much infrastructure building that has to take place before this is something that where you can just start a company, start an app and just onboard 100 billion people to payments.
And then all of a sudden you're rich.
Like it doesn't there's so many steps before we get to that.
And so the easy money is always just buy more to speculate more.
And that is the way things are going.
Right. The space is going to be huge and it is does make
sense to do that uh and i kind of feel like in the early days especially the early bitcoin people
who were just like i'm gonna like just buy everything i have because i know this is gonna
be huge everyone's sleeping on it at some point no one's sort of sleeping on it anymore and it's a
kind of like a leveraged um bet that we're seeing at this point and so the the
thing about like a a treasury company a leveraged treasury company on its own um is purely i would
consider an extractive thing where um basically um the company wants to make money. And so they do so by basically getting other people to lend them money so that they can buy crypto like Bitcoin, especially, but also Ethereum and others.
And that goes up and someone is sort of caught holding the bag at the end or hopefully not too big of a bag.
But it's basically a tool to kind of move in that
direction. Now, having a treasury or a strategy to acquire this as part of an actual real company
is a very different kind of a thing. But I do think that it's kind of weird where you had
MicroStrategy, which was a real company that provided real services, right? And then now they're not a real company anymore.
They're just a way of, you know, pardon my bluntness,
but sort of like scamming noobs into giving them money
so they can get rich off of Bitcoin.
And people who've been to the actual MicroStrategy offices,
you know, they're empty.
Like there's nothing going
on and they don't produce anything there it's just an extractive tool which i can't blame them because
it's working for them right now and i do i do think that it is you know important to get into
some sort of a a digital asset strategy for just about any company but But at some point, this is like a temporary thing. At some point, there won't be any more easily lendable capital to do this kind of thing. And that whole thing
dries up. There's nothing wrong with, again, allocating a portion of, or a lot even,
of spare capital of the company to these kinds of purposes. But if there's no kind of business
model at the end of the day, and you do have expenses tied to this as far as like custody, staff, and all that kind of
stuff, it's just going to end up bleeding. And I think we're going to have a lot of people pivoting.
So it's going to be interesting to where my prediction is in the next couple of years,
you're going to see the vast majority, I mean, probably a lot sooner, but within the last year or two, within the next year or two, you're going to see the vast
majority of treasury companies of any kind go completely bankrupt.
Just go.
I think.
And the ones that remain, no one will notice.
No one will like call them.
No, like they will have a strategy.
They will have crypto capital, but they won't be noticed
they'll kind of fly under the radar as survivors because they will have had
real legitimate use cases and provide real products and services
whether they're purely financial or others.
I think you're making a really good point in that
you need leverage at this point because for Bitcoin BTC to even do another 10 X move, which is, you know, historically a very small move for BTC.
You need something to the tune of like 15 to $20 trillion of market cap to spill into it.
And like, where is all that going to come from? And like, I understand that it could, but that's, you know, we're talking about somewhere near the global market cap of gold, just moving its way into BTC for some reason. And, you know, once you already have, I mean, the U S government has a, has a Bitcoin treasury that, you know, BlackRock's the biggest entity on earth and they're sitting on a stack of bitcoin so it's like the biggest possible buyers have
already come in which is why you have to now be you you have to have leverage to even make it an
interesting play to continue to invest in and i think that's i mean that's a huge warning sign
to me i look at that and say okay well the real fun is over the you know hey i bought bought a
hundred dollars worth of bitcoin in 2013 and it went up by 50,000%. And now I've got enough money to pay
off my mortgage. That's awesome. But that's never going to happen again with the asset because you
can't come up with that much capital. And so that's why you see this sort of like, okay,
how do we make it leverage? And then the next thing is going to be, how do you bundle it together
with more things and create more leverage and more debt and then you know it's like the housing practice it's you know
we've seen this happen for hundreds of years with with other assets so it's really not it will it
will happen no matter what we do it's just because it's just because you know people are stupid like
uh while preparing for this yeah i google it's tripled this year and over 90
percent of uh the 80s holdings is btc and people keep on doing it just because they're stupid and
lazy including me no i think everyone yeah everyone here i i believe and so tell me if I'm wrong but I think everyone here
believes Bitcoin is going to a million dollars so we know that that this industry has much more room
to grow I understand the concerns however I I don't think anyone here thinks that this was it for crypto or, you know, 124K for Bitcoin was the absolute top.
We're never going higher than that.
And if you look at charts like all the money in the world, where all the money in the world is expressed in these small cubes,
these small cubes and it shows all the different types of assets and derivatives
included on this chart. You know that yes, some of the biggest entities in the world have
got into crypto, but they've, if you look at their actual holdings, they've only
barely tipped their toe in. There's a lot more money that's sitting right around the corner if you're if we're talking about
institutions specifically and from a digital asset treasury standpoint we've only got to the tens of
billions of dollars of capital raised uh i believe at this time and um well actually that was this recent quarter so overall
it's still got to be a small amount
compared to the amount that can
flow in through digital asset treasuries over the next
year or coming years
so I don't think
I think what's being said
is that
there is concerns
we're definitely going higher.
And so there are specific digital asset treasuries that are going to do really well because they were the first ones.
They got in early before.
Like it is a hot narrative.
A lot of people are asking about digital asset treasuries.
How do we build with them?
How do we build strategies for them?
All these things right now.
But these are people that are kind of in the know.
There's still a lot of people out there that haven't even figured out what a digital asset
treasury is.
And so many companies that haven't even realized that they should have a digital asset strategy.
They should be holding, you know, digital assets on their balance sheet.
So I think we're, we're kind of, again, to play devil's advocate here, but, but not really.
I mean, I think we're kind of saying like this, this is a, I mean, there's, we're, we're pointing out some, some some good critiques but at the same time we're not
looking far enough down the road in my opinion because i think there's some of these digital
asset treasuries and are solving really great uh problems for let's say other companies or
entities that aren't able to hold spot bitcoin for whatever reason you you know, shareholders or some mandate or whatever. So there's like a real problem in the world that's being solved.
And there's a whole lot more money that's coming in.
And some of these digital asset treasures are going to do a really great job.
What do you guys think about this?
Also, I just want to shout out Omniti Network.
Great to have you here.
well um let me jump in on that a little bit um definitely like so for one thing the point that
Well, let me jump in on that a little bit.
companies will there's so much hold on oh sneeze almost got me oh no um but the the point that
companies are going to go into crypto assets massively more than they are right now is of
course true it's happening and whoever's
early on to the ones that will succeed is going to do well and i would sort of just equate this to
the token launches we've seen with base launching a token with openc launching a token i forget it
was a metamask as well everyone's a token. And there's nothing wrong with having a token necessarily.
There's nothing wrong with raising capital for your legitimate crypto business.
You just have to think about who's buying and what are they getting out of it.
If I were to characterize the base and other token token launch things I would characterize them as
scamming the noobs and it's not like it's a value extraction kind of thing and the thing is like
when we talk about like the treasury company kind of things like it makes sense to have money in
digital assets it makes sense to acquire them at the most favorable terms possible. And having a company that mostly does that at some point does seem to make sense for them.
But then you think about who is financing this?
Where does the money come from?
Now, I would just say be careful for any legitimate company that's just literally trying to leverage this trend and also just take part in the growth of the digital asset allocation space.
Just ask yourself, are your shareholders, the people you're sharing, you're selling to people who are paying money that you're using to pay crypto?
are you scamming the noobs but in in the case of you know the most famous one of course micro
Are you scamming the noobs?
strategy i would say absolutely the noobs are being scammed so hard with with strategy now i
i kind of evolved my thinking on like is sailor going to get wrecked and lose everything
i don't know maybe not but it's pretty obvious at this point that he that micro strategy or strategy whatever we want to
call it today is creating things to sell to people and using that capital to buy the thing that will
go up in value actually so there's you know value dilution and extraction in order to acquire
more of this and you know is it a listen all's fair and love and war right like if people will
buy it like i'm not buyer beware i'm not going to necessarily judge too hard for people saying oh
you scammed people but just be careful about how you acquire all this capital who like why would
someone buy so for example why would someone buy a share in a company that just buys bitcoin
instead of buying bitcoin themselves or like an etf or something a little bit more apples to apples
if you're buying to help a leverage position if you're helping to lend them the money to make
money instead of you maybe that's not so. So just think about how everyone in this thing benefits.
Of course, unless you just don't care
and just want to get money from the noobs
and then finance something cool with it,
that's fine.
Just understand what you're doing.
But it's leverage for you, for the investor too.
And I don't disagree with what you're saying.
I think you have to be questioned who's investing.
But the other thing i'd say is like
these guys are not noobs too right these like the people who are investing in micro strategy the the
institutions for lack of a better term who are backing this yeah they're trading a trend but
the way that these like these instruments are structured the ways that they're investing with
in micro strategies like this is the concern is that these people don't lose money. Like if Bitcoin comes off $20,000 and things kind
of pull back, like it'll seriously hurt the unwinding of that position for micro strategies
will seriously hurt the market as a whole. And like these guys are experts in financial
engineering in every way possible. And they don't lose money. Like they will figure out a way to make this work for them.
And I think the,
like back to what Aztec was saying,
like the two things
that you kind of highlighted
were digital asset treasuries
as a company,
like as a pure play,
that being your sole business,
that's one thing.
But being a business,
like just say like,
I don't know,
like GameStop.
And GameStop adopting,
like holding Bitcoin as an alternative to cash,
like as a true treasury asset with an existing business.
That's a much different value proposition.
And I think that's the,
like that's where we're trying to get to, right?
We're trying to get to a place
where you have companies treating digital assets
truly as cash.
And these digital assets are treasury companies
that are just pure play,
like they have a strategy or whatever.
And strategy is a little unique because they have a business,
but that business is far eclipsed by their treasury strategy now.
They're unique because, well, they're unique,
but they provide a concern because the fact that some of them have so much
leverage does pose a risk.
But I'm kind of curious to see how they evolve because I think you're going to see that some
of these companies become effectively what would be effectively SPACs. So as time goes on and as
kind of the heat or the call it hype around these dots starts to cool. And you start to see kind of you start to
see these multiples of call it 5x or 6x or 7x the amount of crypto that they hold on their balance
sheet, and they trade out of 6x multiple to that nav, that starts to cool off, you'll start to see
some I think you'll start to see some of these digital asset treasuries start to kind of, okay, now we're sitting on all this cash functionally, or this asset that's worth something. And what are we going to do now? Because we can't get a multiple in the market, just continuing to sit on crypto and getting some advisors and all that stuff. So now we'll actually become like SPACs, like they become functionally deals that now are just sitting on a ton of cash
and they will then go look to enter another business.
And one of the potential benefits there
is that because they're so focused on crypto,
they could actually become companies
that focus on specific verticals
in the digital asset space.
Now, that's not to say that they all will.
Some, I'm sure, will also just go down the road
and become completely other things.
But it is an interesting situation because one of the biggest concerns is that you've created a bubble where you have all of these inflated values and you have all this stuff.
But one of the best parts of these digital asset treasury companies is that their fundamental asset is cash.
It's not close to cash.
It's not close to cash.
It's not like they're investing heavily in a CapEx business
or speculating on something that basically if they blow up
and then the bubble bursts,
that they're all going to be left with nothing.
If the bubble bursts, they're going to be left with some value
of digital asset has some value that then they can employ
that then they can employ or they can deploy into something.
or they can deploy into something.
I think that's a good point for me to jump in about tokenization real quickly
because I think that's a good point that they would not just mangle value
to the point of it being useless, but also the value is in uniform, right?
Like when you go between a dollar and a lira,
you're not just taking a different fiat risk
you're you're looking at what bottlenecks those two risks so easy example um i was network security
engineer for a company that kind of stupidly decided to go with oracle's cloud v1 product
if anybody's worked with oracle before you know it's a really big company and smaller, less valuable or lower
revenue projects don't get as much love.
So that was not a high quality cloud product.
And when we were pitched by Amazon and Google and others why we should come to their cloud
services, they offered us credits.
They offered us, you know, somewhere around 50 to $100,000 in, hey, you can use our cloud
for free up to this
level. And we started trying to break down how much that value would correspond to like, you
know, Azure has cheaper data storage for this type of data. Amazon has cheaper operations for this
type of instance, like doing that math made it really obvious how different the value was when
both major cloud operations offered
us, you know, 100K. Their sales groups were just ready to dole that out because we were a publicly
traded company. As a publicly traded company, you have risks, you have to manage disclosure.
There's a whole bunch of reasons why you would or wouldn't want to do something that just ignores
the risks associated with a number that is a valuation. But that property of DATs deciding to say, you know, manage a large amount of digital
assets as their treasury, like the each one of these is a unique risk profile.
They're making a decision that, hey, Litecoin or a dog or a Bitcoin, whatever asset is going
to become this tool that's worth it for them.
That's a bet on the future. Yeah, duh. But that valuation of that bet is wildly different. It's
not just, hey, this company has X number of crypto in dollars. There's a risk for each one of those
assets as they choose it, you know, that's going to affect the, you know, the viability of that
treasury.
And to Zane's point, there's a, you know, a pretty reasonable strategy to say, okay,
let's reallocate some of this.
Let's, you know, set time horizons on this to make a decision by next quarter and stuff
like that.
That's really standard board conversations.
But there's a part of that
conversation that's frequently ignored, which is abstracting away from the risks of evaluation.
So I think that's something that we should look out for in digital, you know, asset treasury
companies in general, not just that that might become their value, incidentally, because they've
just put all their risks in one basket of eggs. Oh, hey, I'm, you know, pivoting from pharma to just holding Litecoin. That's not
a great, you know, way to make yourself a DAT, in my opinion. I'm not just saying that because,
you know, Zane works with Lotholio, but there's a really obvious choice to say, hey, I'm just going
to ignore risk and go for this, you know, thing that might make me seem investment worthy or, hey, I have a measured risk management
process that makes me decide why I want to be in this position with this asset. Really simply said,
tokenization is by definition something existing as a representation of where it can't be.
So why would I want tokenized commodities from an energy company when I can just hold
their stock and vote in their governance?
There's different reasons why I would pick, let's say, the stock instead of Bitcoin as
an energy asset.
There's different choices that you would make, and they have to make sense somehow.
I don't see all these DATs putting that into a thesis or even stating, hey, here's why
we did this. Hey, I want to take this opportunity really fast to just thank everyone for being here.
You know, it's not always comfortable to have people who come from a variety of perspectives
on the same panel. And it's really great and productive when we have these open conversations where people
aren't yelling at each other and they're able to represent different perspectives on digital
asset treasuries and on whatever the topic at hand is. So thank you all for being respectful
to each other, to everyone on the panel, and for being open to having conversations with people who
don't come from the same background or the same frame of mind.
Thank you so much, everyone. That's it. Please continue.
Yeah, much love. We love the differing of opinions on the show. I also, Zane, you sparked the idea of
sparked the idea of how will debts use the wealth that they generate or the success to
promote crypto. And I think that's a really interesting strand to pull on because I'm wondering, you know, will will these deaths start coming online on chain and, you know, how will they participate? How will they leverage existing blockchain technologies to build their strategies?
um and and you know i think a lot of people right now are seeing all this money flow into
blue chip assets but there's a lot of really great technologies that aren't getting as much
interest at the moment but if these digital asset treasuries want to build unique strategies
or get yield, they can do this on chain and this benefits other technologies and the industry at
large. So that's one thing. I don't know if anyone wants to jump on that or talk about that.
But also, again, going back to what I was saying earlier,
there's also a group of companies, entities, institutions
that can't buy Bitcoin spot.
It could be due to, you know, some mandate or, you know, too much risk where the board can't move forward with it, but they are able to buy some type of, you know, digital asset treasury on the stock market or one of the stock markets out there.
one of the stock markets out there.
And so I do also see that there's,
this is a solution for getting more people into crypto,
more entities and growing the industry.
So anyone want to pull on any of these strings here?
Also, welcome to the show, Reggie Middleton.
University.
Hey, Aztec.
and I do apologize, guys.
I'm going to have to jump off here after this.
I have another call here in 20 minutes.
But,
yeah,
it is an interesting subject to see where these things go, right?
Like all this accumulated value that they have, all these debts have,
has to go somewhere.
And I do hope that we see this return investment or return kind of development of technologies.
And maybe you even see like,
there's two trends I think are interesting.
So one, maybe you see kind of this reverse SPAC kind of model where you look at,
I've heard rumblings that MakerDAO is
looking at doing, spinning something,
or I can't remember what they call it now,
there's a new name,
but is looking at doing some,
doing a NASDAQ offering.
And that would be via a DAT kind of structured vehicle.
First of all, I have tons of issues with that just as a principle, but all that said,
I just think that that model will, I think, become a little bit more pervasive.
And you'll see some of these, call it tier one, digital asset projects potentially be able to try it out,
need tons of capital to really grow.
We'll look at these dots as a way to access that
because they have these pools of capital sitting there.
And then two, I think you're seeing this kind of also reverse model
where there's a massive drive for tokenization of just general assets
that trade on traditional markets.
the most recent, the SuperState
listing or SuperState
call it structure
of taking
Galaxy Digital's
traditional equity that trades on
a national exchange
and then taking that onto Solana.
I talked to the SuperState guys a couple of weeks or last week and they have a huge lineup of companies,
NASDAQ and NYSE listed companies trying to do the same thing.
And I just find it super ironic because basically what you're doing is in the most convoluted way,
you're taking a digital asset treasury company that represents a bunch of crypto, then you're going to basically relist that company, rewrap that back inside a Solana
wrapper, and then it'll trade as another token. It completely makes no sense at all.
But what I do think it does suggest is that this massive drive is you're going to see a lot more
just traditional companies start to see their equity represented on chain, which I actually do have a belief is probably one of the next
big trends. And you're seeing like Coinbase is doing it. And I think Robinhood has done it with
a couple of companies as well, where they're bringing some of this traditional equity on chain.
And that's, I think, just the first part. It's going to happen really, really quickly, but I think that's potentially the next trend beyond these dots,
and that's kind of how things will evolve.
Yeah, I'm starting to see that play out as well
in people positioning, teams' position for this.
I've seen some other similar type of projects that are essentially
bringing traditional investment vehicles on chain. So yeah, that's going to be really interesting.
Nicole, you have a question that you want to bring up with digital asset treasuries, or I can go ahead and bring up another one here?
No, so I actually, so just based on, so I'm not offering criticism or praise, right, for digital asset treasuries.
I'm just here to ask questions.
And there was a question on Darren's list that's like really relevant to the conversation that we've had so far.
I wanted to ask if we could address that.
And it's really like if one of the big treasury companies went under, what kind of impact would that have across crypto?
I think it depends which one goes under.
I mean, let's face David Bailey's involved in like half a dozen of them or more and
they all seem like the same company white labeled across a bunch of different legal entities uh you
know so i i mean and there's also all kinds of weird foreign ones as well but uh you know if
somebody like strategy were to suddenly crap out i mean that'd be as far as i'm concerned basically
be over at that point because uh if you know the
guy that got in at the lowest possible price is you know didn't do it right and has failed in some
way it i think calls the entire model into question but um i think it also depends why
you know is it because the price of btc dipped way below what anybody estimated and there's some
kind of forced liquidation or or whatever like i know strategy is structured pretty well to deal with like big volatility but
i'm not sure how well lots of these other entities are are structured for that kind of thing so
uh i think it really depends but i mean all of this stuff is obviously based on
you know people's hopes and dreams about whatever and you know if suddenly they become
you know, people's hopes and dreams about whatever. And, you know, if suddenly they become,
uh, actually risky because people start, you know, losing serious money. Um, I don't know.
I, I think that's the end of, of that the same way it's been the end of lots of things, you know,
and NFTs, NFTs went away because your $6 million monkey is worth, you know, 12 bucks today. And,
you know, like that's, that's the kind of thing that once it happens, ain't
no monkey going to 6 million bucks again. So that's how I see it.
But the difference, the two differences I'd say is like one, strategy, the only thing
that I think that would really kill strategy is a pullback in the price of Bitcoin. And
two, strategy has a little bit more than a picture of a monkey.
They do have an asset that actually has some value, I guess, is the other side to it, too.
Sure.
And like I said, strategy is set up to deal with volatility better than probably any of the rest of them.
But volatility also is what it is.
So we'll see. If it happens, then we'll say,
oh yeah, that was obvious or something. Well, so, and then here's kind of a follow-up question
to that, and it doesn't have to be Kurt who answers, so it can be, right? So at what point
do we start seeing crypto hedge funds and, I don't know, companies and large holders
bail out if treasury companies were to fail? Is there such a thing as too big to fail? Right,
Kurt? You just identified strategy as a company that if it failed, everything would sort of be done with it.
So are we starting to look at a situation where bailouts are necessary?
And is there anybody even cumulatively who could provide those kind of bailouts?
I want to respond to this one because I think that's a really funny axiom.
There's no standing army.
There's no central planner for Bitcoin.
So if someone, you know, grossly abuses Bitcoin, for example, strategy, misconfiguring a transfer
and then sending, you know, a billion plus dollars into the unusable dirt, you know,
that should, you know, be worked out by the market, right?
you know be worked out by the market right like that should be a natural market force kind of
Like that should be a natural market force kind of thing.
thing i think it's pretty evident that any dat who doesn't have other forms of value would never
survive that because why should you bail them out what what do they have to offer like to zane's
point you know if there's some fraction of that value that's able to be recovered then you know
capitalize on it and try to continue the song and dance. But if you screw up as a treasury company, what's the motivation to bail you out?
What secondary value are you going to pull up with later?
How have you created an economy of worth to be justifiable?
Even if you were just asking for crowdfunding, like, hey, Bitcoiners, sorry, we're strategy and we're great, but we screwed up.
We want Saylor to continue being the cheerleader for Bitcoin. Please donate. That's not going to work. What's the reasoning?
Why should we bail them out? We shouldn't. If you screw up as a DAT, you deserve to be ended.
I'm sorry. It's not even a bailout, right? When it actually becomes,
and to your point, what will happen is these hedge funds and opportunists will take advantage of the situation
and accumulate the digital assets that
sit on these balance sheets.
Or in a lot of cases, some of these
debts have so much leverage on them
that the people who have
the call on the collateral already will just seize it.
And then
depending on the value of the asset, like we're talking about
tier one kind of cryptocurrencies
like Bitcoin, etc.
Then if we have those tier one assets,
like those specific things,
it will...
Like those will get seized and people take advantage of it.
Then you'll see the value go back
and it'll go through the cycle,
but they'll be the ultimate winners, right? The strategy share will just be left with nothing and the hedge funds and the other or
strategies example and the hedge funds and the other guys will be the ones who actually
end up winning because they just get to get all buy all these assets at a significant discount
and i do apologize guys but i do have to jump here but really appreciate the opportunity to
to connect today and i'm sorry i have to jump
early here it's a great conversation i'd like to stay longer but i have another call here i have
to jump on so thank you good talk take care guys you're a legend bro i gotta i'd like to jump in
on omni network's uh point i have to say like if if one of these, let's say strategy, if they were to send their Bitcoin to the wrong address
or, like, you know, basically send it into the Ether,
in my opinion, that would effectively act like a burn.
And I actually am going to take the opposite side of that bet.
I think that that would be really bad for strategy the company but i think crypto bros
would probably take that as bullish news and uh bitcoin would would probably go up
welcome to the show ck or donna what's up man uh thank you thank you for that welcome aztec
um and also and shout out to quick And shout out to QuickSwap.
Shout out to the room. And also, I just want to say it was awesome to hear from Zane.
Shout out to Luxfolio. Shout out to LightStrategy. Shout out to Litecoin. I see Dashpay down there.
Let's go. Hey, man, we're seeing folks releasing all kinds of cool open source code on ThorChain,
Folks releasing all kinds of cool open source code on Thor Chain, Thor Swap, Leo Dex, Houdini Swap.
What is this? This is decentralized freedom liquidity of the people, ladies and gentlemen.
We already know. What's so funny when people model like, how much of this do we need to be free and
think about this? The 1% owns the trillions, right? The people are subsisting on SIPs.
So think about this, guys.
If we move even $50 billion worth of Bitcoin and Litecoin and Cardano and Midnight that's
coming on Halloween, let's go, MFs.
We owe the freedom.
We need hope, right?
So I just want to say, I'm going to focus this back because these treasury companies
this back because these treasury companies are so exciting and a piece of the power,
are so exciting and a piece of the power.
but it is at the intersection of the Martha Pelosi tea insider suit cook and the freedom,
right? And I think as I think Kurt very cogently pointed out a lot of things,
the context matters, right? For instance, we've got this light strategy. Formerly,
My Pharma was their branding. Now get this, they are a profitable, revenue-positive, legitimate
company. They're also domestic. Now, I don't know about all of their supply chain with respect to
these recent tariffs we heard about yesterday in the pharmaceutical-branded industry, but not to
go too far down that, but what I'm trying to say here, we have a revenue-positive company
locking Litecoin, only 84 million, guys. So let's first principles this. What is Michael
Saylor doing? He realizes, as we all do, $37.5 trillion is the national debt, right? US dollar
denominated. What's happening in four days? The government, quote unquote, shuts down.
They know they have to push paper that's going to add trillions, guys. Think about that sticker
shock that no one's talking about.
And that's on purpose, guys.
And why is this discount presented?
Because Pelosi and these folks, Bitcoin will break its all-time high by Halloween, most likely.
Watch it happen.
Bitcoin will hit $150,000 before the end of 2025.
I'm going to put a 98.7% probability on that.
Yeah, I have one of those weird brains when I
survey the world. I can come up with these interesting novel syntheses. Shout out to
Richard Feynman and building these constellations. And we're not even getting into quantum
coherence and all this occupation of supervision. I'm going to land this plane here.
MicroStrategy is borrowing from an infinite system. Dollars lost 11% of its value this year.
is borrowing from an infinite system. Dollars lost 11% of its value this year. He's locking
it into 21 million units. Okay. Those units are currently going at for about $110,000.
Those units is of no land for all. That's why, even if there's antagonisms between China and
America and Russia, they're going to announce international oil trade with Bitcoin as the
preferred unit of account, guys.
That is how the sovereign wealth. That's how we build that, guys.
So so just it's going to be good. They're cooking the books. We've seen it happen.
There's a reason why Pelosi is successful. This is a discount.
Clarity Act makes the lawyers happy. Middle of October.
October 10th is Grayscale's final spot Litecoin ETF deadline.
So Luxfolio is going to do well.
Lite strategy is going to do well.
If you are accumulating hard cap supply, UTXO-based assets with global validation and distribution
of the ledger and the consensus mechanisms, rather global decentralization and distribution
of validation and consensus mechanisms.
Anyway, land the plane.
Awesome conversation, guys. Some of these companies will fail some will do very well hey i'd like to jump in because it's everybody's too happy it's too much sunshine and when everybody's too positive
chances are everybody's wrong so i have perspective to. Would you rather the good news or the bad news first?
Lay it on us.
Say it again?
I said I love the bad news.
I'm ready for both.
And I'm looking forward to the fruit of your perspective and knowledge.
So it's not really about good news and bad news.
It's about facts, empiricism, and realism.
So as for, I believe I'm 100% behind Kurt
on terms of utility versus financial speculation.
I'm in New York.
I was born and raised in New York.
And a lot of people fall into the mythos that is Wall Street.
Wall Street is the industry that makes money by standing in between two parties.
And so whenever they can make a commission, a spread, an interest or a transaction fee, they will.
So they took something that had none of that.
And they put it in there and to increase their bonus pool through
commissions, spreads, transaction fees, etc. They marketed the hell out of it. They started with
Bitcoin and they're moving on to the other assets. The problem is that has absolutely nothing to do
with the fundamental value of the networks themselves. As a matter of fact, Bitcoin is
more speculation than anything else and when fact, Bitcoin is more speculation than
anything else and when it started it was more utility than anything else. Now
nothing necessarily wrong with that unless you're still you know imbibing on
the Kool-Aid that Bitcoin is more valuable as a speculative asset than
utility asset. Now Bitcoin has lost its utility over time because those who imbibed in Bitcoin have lost
their way. But utility is the only way you can have a fundamental value that will persevere
through Wall Streetification. Think of utility as a put option. So when you have bad news or
someone just successfully shorts Bitcoin, for whatever reason, the price goes down.
Utility value is the floor, right?
The value floor.
And any time it goes below that value floor, you have guaranteed money by purchasing it.
Think of it as arbitrage.
A good example would be a building.
You have the Empire State Building.
The Empire State Building throws off $100 million a month in rent.
Okay, so let's use straight numbers. state building, the Empire State Building throws off $100 million a month in rent. Okay.
So let's use straight numbers.
Okay.
No capitalization.
That makes an Empire State Building worth $1.2 billion.
Okay.
Because you're priced at one year's rent.
Now, if you have a big real estate crash in terms of pricing, not leases, and they drive
the price of the Wall Street
Empire State Building down to a hundred million dollars does that mean you lost
money no because now you're getting 1.2 billion dollars of cash flow of a
hundred million dollar principle so just for that fact alone that price would be
driven up by anybody who can count.
When you Wall Streetify Bitcoin, you're just proving people can't count or they're willing to speculate whether that's food theory.
Now, moving on past the Wall Streetification of Bitcoin, I'm going to get back to that. The good news is there is a very, very strong use case for distributed ledger technologies and their centralized brethren and cousins.
And that is AI. In order for LLMs and the new AI frontier models to really be worth their
investment, you're going to have to set them free, which means you have to have them become
agentic. You have to let them move along and transact on
their own, or at least with a quasi-sovereign perspective. That means they have to buy and
sell assets, services, utility, et cetera. Think of your chat GPT going on as an agent with your
parameters and guardrails, buying compute to solve a problem, or buying development
services that it can itself take care of, or buying storage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, you know they're not going to go and use a credit card. You know they're not going to go
through the banking system. They're going to use DOT rails. And the most, either they'll come up
with their own DOT rails or they use an extLT Rails simply because they're already used by the raw.large, writ large.
And you have the most likely the largest use case of DLT Rails ever.
There are going to be more agents buying and selling things than people buying and selling things and companies buying and selling things by multiple.
Agents can replicate.
What is an agent? An agent could be
what makes your Tesla work, your Samsung refrigerator work, your cell phone, your watch,
your earbuds, et cetera. Multiply that by an order of what? 100, 200, 1,000 times,
and think about that commerce. So the DOT race is just getting started. But that is not what these digital asset treasuries are buying or selling. They're selling the Wall Streetification of this technology, which is closely meaningless. And they of this is disclosed in any of the S1 filings.
They're not disclosed as a risk. What happens? You're going to have a correction, price correction,
a strong one. Now, that price correction guarantees to halt at the utility floor,
because remember, that's that put option. But that put option doesn't exist in the minds of investors when they don't even know that a put option exists. They don't even
know that the IP that is being used is patented and owned by a private entity. And they've sit
the Kool-Aid saying, but this is open source. And because it's open source, we can do whatever we
want. But that's not true. Open source is a licensing paradigm based upon copyright law.
Okay, if I stole your car, if I stole your Tesla that has all the agents in it, and it's operating,
buying downloads and upgrades to the software and compute and toll booth access, etc. And I
open source it and gave free Uber rides. Does that make that Tesla belong to me now? Of course not.
free Uber rides, does that make that Tesla belong to me now?
Of course not.
There's so much that everybody's missing that in every other industry would never be overlooked.
If Intel decided or Qualcomm decided to build a new chip fab, do you think they'd check
to see if that technology was owned by somebody before they put $13 billion into it?
And it doesn't matter if they did or not trust me their investors would and if they
didn't trust me you have a shareholder lawsuit quick fast not to mention of course the obvious
patent infringement lawsuit so i'll go land my plane there none of this is good news or bad news
it's fact in perspective okay everybody roger you're you're a legend. And I wanted to hear you keep jumping in because it's great to hear your voice.
Now, a couple of things on what you said.
One of the things you said is that a proof of work asset that will be able to make it through the financialization or the Wall Street defecation
of the assets needs utility. This is actually one of the things I've been saying about Litecoin,
for instance, because it's proof of work, has a robust network, but also has a lot of utility. Litecoin is still used like money.
Bitcoin was originally not intended to be digital gold,
but it's kind of more become digital gold than it is kind of used as money.
But Litecoin continues to be used as money.
you know, continues to be used as money.
Also, I'm building LitVM,
which is providing programmability for Litecoin.
And one of the things I've also been saying is that I,
and it's, LitVM enables Litecoin to trustlessly interact with Web3.
And one of the things I'm very bullish on
that sparked my thoughts is that
I do believe the agentic world is going to be massive.
There's going to be more agents
than there are people deploying strategies.
And so if they can do that in a trustless manner,
I think that agents will choose proof
of work assets, specifically Litecoin over stable coins for many reasons.
So glad to hear your thoughts on all of that.
I'm not sure if anyone else wants to jump in and piggyback off what Reggie was saying.
Yeah, man.
I have a lot more to say yeah
reggie those were awesome awesome thoughts man and i i i have i agree with pretty much with a great
deal of it there's some of the patent kind of thing like imagine if all of humanity decided
we're going to share a picture of a goldfish because some tyrannical person saying you you're
going to go to jail for a year if you sell a picture of a goldfish. Good luck stopping it. So open source, what that means, once that cat's out of the bag,
it's over. Good luck stopping it. Now imagine that's also money. That's freedom. And meanwhile,
you can't even pay your rent. You can't afford to comply. And so you rise. That's also why when
we look at Solana, it's 400 terabytes to move that ledger around the world. Litecoin's 100 gigabytes.
So if you're out running hostile AI or Russia's coming into Ukraine,
you can move a global validation and consensus with Litecoin real quick.
ADA, the 45 billion smart contract capable ADA built on unspent transaction output technology
that scales the seven transactions per second of Bitcoin that
actually unlocks that very insightful comment about agentic artificial intelligence monetization
mechanisms, regimes, and models. Obviously, seven transactions per second is not sufficient to
actually move that, nor is three to five business days. But we would be remiss if we didn't consider
the ways in which XRP, for instance, went to banks more than a decade ago and said, we're going to do international settlement better than you.
Do you want to have your lunch eaten or do you want to get into bed?
They said, oh, we'll get into bed, but we're going to sue you because we're dastardly.
Just like that movie, There Will Be Blood, shout out to Daniel Day-Lewis, when he was taking farmers, millions of dollars worth of oil.
But he's like, oh, you got quail here.
And I like that kind of crap, man.
So get this.
You save with 21 million Bitcoin. You spend with 84 million Litecoin. You build with 45 billion ADA and you be with 24 billion night. Furthermore, night has built in
a secondary gas token. So you do 24 billion night, infinite gas dust. Knight creates dust. Now get this.
Knight is also built to be compatible with XRP, Solana, Ethereum. It's the come one, come all.
It is the Roman aqueducts of privacy for all. So exactly. There's going to be agentic technologies
that understand Nash equilibrium. And when we can already achieve scalable algorithmic Nash equilibrium. It's a
sane approach, if you will. And UTXO uniquely allows us to do this because Ethereum and Solana
and accounts-based assets break the first law of thermodynamics, if you will, which is to say
energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Whereas with Bitcoin, you can literally track
deterministically and causally throughout time
with mathematical formalism, all of the transactions, all of the value flows.
Imagine an unbreakable crystal ball that the whole world could look into.
And inside this crystal ball is 21 million grains of sand.
And each of these grains of sand is divisible by 100 million units
called satoshi. So in the same way that a dollar has 100 pennies, one Bitcoin has 100 million satoshi.
And then we further realize that these 12 and 24 words in a certain order
contain the mathematics that holds all possible receive addresses for the asset.
So if the protocol says, hello, person that's seeking freedom, you matrix escape artist,
you, here's 12 words in a certain order.
They'll only be shown twice in the universe.
Write them down, you who would be free.
And you go, oh God, okay, I'm going to carve this on metal and bury it under
a tree. But what I now have is the ability to create receive addresses with a code that I could
send to a friend with Romeo and Juliet. I go, hey Aztec, remember that copy, 1983, third edition,
Romeo and Juliet, page 32. Suddenly I'm giving Aztec a seed phrase with a book, maybe the Bible or the Constitution or
the Magna Carta. I'm going to land this plane. 21 million, 84 million, 45 billion, 24 billion,
right? We save, we spend, we build, we be. We cook the freedom recipe. All of these ledgers
are less than a terabyte. So understand, Solana runs in a billionaire's garage.
Ethereum, what we're going to see in October 10th, the Litecoin ETF is going to be approved.
Ethereum, we got a gentleman out here being Institutional Exit Liquidity, Mr. TL.
And what they're going to do is they're going to roll from Ethereum to Solana.
Not because it's right.
Not because Solana is a freedom network.
As Reggie said, there is a utility value of these networks and it's freedom.
You have freedom with Litecoin. And I'm going to land the plane here. We saw eight consecutive
blocks mined by one entity on the Bitcoin network, which means someone had the hash rate so they
could solve the random math. And they said, hey, I'll take the money to mint the block,
you know, because you've got the core and knots and maybe some people filtered those blocks. Whatever reason, one entity on Bitcoin mainnet mined eight blocks in a row.
But guess what we can do with these open source technologies?
If that went to 8, 9, 10, 30, I would use, say, ThorSwap, migrate my value from the 21 million Bitcoin UTXOs to the 84 million Litecoin UTXOs.
Because next month, Litecoin is celebrating 14 years of flawless uptime.
So these young people in Nepal yearning to breathe free,
they don't have to figure out money because we've done it for them.
And we do it every day with Bitcoin, Litecoin, Cardano, midnight.
So we're unstoppable, guys.
I love the thoughts there, Reggie.
So yes, patents might exist, but I don't think they matter.
Trust your gut.
It's not any one asset. Monolithic things have one failure mode. The only way to make
Bitcoin a CBDC was to cook the Max Keiser recipe. Fortunately, he failed, but we're all humans,
so we forgive it. Let me ask you a question. Can I introduce a patent? Real quick to i have to call out what an incredibly talented like town crier ck is
because this is like i like this is this is the kind of guy who you know 500 years ago would be
standing in the town square giving the news but like the rhyme and whimsy to it is just like
phenomenal so who knows i was going to say something like that,
but let me just ask you a question, CK. So are you talking using a cell phone or a computer?
I am coming to you from a bombardment of the Higgs field, a unique instance of energetic
excitation, which is to say, sir, you haven't even given me a whiskey or a little bit
of greenery. But it's- Cell phone, basically. You're on a cell phone, right? Amen. Yes, sir.
Let's go with that. Okay. So assuming you're using an Apple, if you're using something like
a Samsung Fold or something more advanced, you're using between 1,200 and 2,000 patents.
Okay?
Those patents are purchased and used by Apple and or Samsung because they have to.
Number one, they can't invent everything.
And if you're going to grow at any significant pace,
you're going to have to use other technology.
Number one.
Number two, they matter to Apple and
Samsung and to everybody who patented and invented that technology. The fastest growing technologies
in the world are also the most rife with patents. The slowest technologies in the world have a very
thin patent thicket. It's simply not true to say patents don't matter or they slow innovation.
Look at the most innovative and fastest growing technologies,
pharmaceuticals, genetic engineering, cell phones,
the internet back in the nineties and two thousands
and two thousands and tens.
Just look at history.
So words are one thing, but historical fact
is hard to disprove.
Amen.
Amen.
I want to back you up on this because I'm sorry guys,
I'm buttoning, but I'm heading into a very big meeting. It's going to be good for all 400 people here. Patents are everything when it comes to disruptive innovation.
So it's the best way to signature. Patents aren't foolproof.
I want to introduce popology to you.
As language form, most popological, popology turns everybody and their online presences into living NFTs
for your data from every platform you belong to.
From curation in a meta-search engine with a video- a video only meta search engine, there is none that
you control the menu. We're the first. Video, you create long format podcasts curated on you and
then you pick the commercials. We call them pop-mercials for every brand you like. And you
get paid. You get rewarded. You are the arbiter of your popular.
And this is under patent because this would have been taken.
So, and I also love, RJ, your enthusiasm and your diligence and your communication speak is very fabulous and fantastic.
And yes, we should not hold ourselves back on ideas, move forward, get your stuff penned out,
but be very critical to your idea that there's someone else that's going to have a little more
money and take your idea if you don't steal it up. So in this blockchain space, it is the wild west.
There is a difference between a spade shovel to dig for gold and using a snow shovel because you can hold more.
But the real concept here is to use the blockchain in innovative ways.
I want to say one thing about securities tokens that are the USD and the stable coining.
They're on this because they know how powerful this is.
And so I urge everyone here to think of utility of real world assets and tokenize that.
Even if it's your recipes, even if it's the words you know, that in reality, Google is
collecting data on all of us right now.
And they know us better than we do.
So that's where Popology, go to popologynetworks.com,
look at our real business opportunity.
We've been funded for a global scale.
And anyone that follows us on Twitter, you have my word,
I will give you a free wallet to be part of Popology,
to be a part of this launch that's going to happen by August of,
I'm sorry, April of next year.
So I'm in super enthusiasm. This room's on fire,
and I appreciate whoever the organizers are here. You guys are great. And just keep an eye on
Popology. You have our word. We are going to eradicate. All right, there you go.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I want to jump back into the kind of the discussion of that Reggie and CK were bringing up here. Appreciate you sharing popology, though.
You know, the mythos on things like IP, you know, most people who opine on IP don't know much about IP.
It's a law thing.
You know, say I believe in open source.
I don't believe in patents and et cetera or copyright.
But you cannot open source something if you don't own it.
Open source means you create a license where people can use it freely, you know, contingent upon XYZ parameters or without
recourse. But you can't give away something you never owned in the first place.
So, you know, again, not good news or bad news, just fact and perspective. Okay.
So let's get a discussion on. I don't have to jump on the plane in a minute,
but until then, let's build. I love that, Reggie. I love that,
man. And what I'll say is this, as we are seeing laws and nations and even money, the definition
of a currency, and shout out to Satoshi Nakamoto. He understood this with the peer-to-peer electronic
cash. There are qualities that are implicit to the use of cash and or currency. One,
mutually agreed upon medium of exchange. Two, store of value. Three, unit of account.
That first one's the hardest. If you get everyone around the world saying, I care about it and you
care about it. I don't care if King or da-da-da or Moon or whoever cares about it. If you and I
agree it has value, we're in business.
And now with Bitcoin, the Promethean fire that was lit by Satoshi Nakamoto is that he introduced a universal state of economic fair play for everyone on the planet with an internet connection and a phone, a smart device, a laptop.
And that has never happened before. So now you have
technologies where we can see and speak that allowed, for instance, in Tahrir Square more
than 10 years ago, a bunch of college kids took over Egypt, even with a militaristic regime.
Go ahead and look up what Tahrir Square was in the Twitter revolutions. And then look up right
now what's happening in Nepal. And so when we look at patent law, that holds about as much weight as the First Amendment does, doesn't it?
Right?
And as we can see, pirates will step on pieces of effing paper.
So while Reggie is absolutely correct, if you seek to be complicit in some system of consensus called a country, because America only exists in the minds and hearts of all of us, as does any piece of paper.
Shout out to the Magna Carta. And so what I'm suggesting is akin to the Tor network,
I can say, ooh, I got my piece of it because there's a reason why Satoshi and a lot of these
things have MIT copyrights. If you've never read The Coming Insurrection by the Invisible Committee,
then To Our Friends, and then Now, I'd go ahead and look at that and consider time travel
and relativity. But I digress. A patent is ultimately a cooperative society. Code that I
am more free if I put Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Cardano on my blockchain, everyone in the world
is going to go, you know what? I've seen the leader of the highest nation in the land act a
fucking fool. And so if on my cell phone,
I can quietly levy a piece of peaceful revolution and freedom, light the underground railroad,
everyone in the world's going to light that damn candle. Everyone with a cell phone. You know why
they threw over the government in Nepal? They were too poor and they took away TikTok. Now you tell
me I can't pay my rent. All across America, we have more than 10 million people in cars with no reason
to comply. We need to give them hope. And so you can, I know it's not to you, but yeah,
so I'm landing. Patents matter and businesses will be built. I love what you said there,
Reggie, with the fiat industrial complex and the Wall Streetification of Bitcoin, that is happening, right? And custody matters. And there are going to be freedom networks that
can't be stopped, whether you have the paperwork or not, because game theoretically, it is in your
best interest to hold on. Because here's what's going to happen. Every PlayStation 5, every Xbox,
soon every phone is not only going to hold all your freedom money,
Tether, the most profitable company per employee in the world, guess what they made that money with?
Transaction fees. So suddenly the people are going to have PlayStation fives. There's a project
called a Cyclone Q. It's shipping now. Imagine you buy a PlayStation five, you give it internet.
And then what it does is it does the transaction fees for Bitcoin,
Litecoin, Cardano, and privacy on midnight. We heard that there was one content creator that
made more money than LeBron James last year, $100 million. The market cap of Litecoin right now is
around $9 billion. Could you imagine if everyone, every OnlyFans content creator said, you know what?
Me and my generation, we're all slaves. We're not good with that. Let's all ladies, let's put this money into Litecoin. And then everyone that has a food
truck in America goes, hey guys, these dollars are losing value, but I've got a successful taco
truck. What if all the taco trucks in America lock their profit into Litecoin? And they go,
oh wow. And then every coffee shop and they go, hey guys, the dollar's losing value,
but Bitcoin, Litecoin and Cardano are holding because it's fundamental supply and demand.
There's only 84 million.
So all these small businesses are billions.
That's how we become free, guys.
You don't need a patent to do it. just put out a report saying that when Litecoin is being used to settle some type of payment,
about 5% of that is kept on the balance sheet of these companies.
And that number is growing.
So instead of like, you know, let's say someone buys a good,
they buy a taco at a taco
truck and they pay in litecoin and and uh it immediately gets converted to cash five percent
of this uh this capital is actually staying in litecoin and it's that's growing so i i do think
that people are starting to wake up and realize that these currencies matter and they want to hold
these assets. I think this only grows. Reggie, I have a question for you. I don't know when you
have to leave. You said something about a plane, but I know a little bit about you.
And I've been trying to find out more. Funnily enough, in the light coin community. There's a lot of people that, uh,
really respect you and have been pushing me to research and find out more
about you. I was recently looking at the silver rounds, uh,
to support, to support you. Um, and it's, it's,
it's interesting that you're here because, uh,
I was just doing research and everything on vertesium and all stuff but anyways
um is there a scenario where these patents aren't hold and it causes a massive disruption or a crash. And, you know, is there a scenario where somehow, you know, there's a good outcome or what's your thoughts on that?
I would need for you to define what a good outcome is, you know, because a lot of people comment and I'm not a lawyer.
So, you know, don't take my word as legal gospel.
A hundred percent.
So good outcome to me is the market not crashing. When you were talking earlier, correct me if I'm wrong, you said something about these patents holders coming in and causing a scare.
I mean, is there a way that things can move forward positively in your eyes where it works on both sides you're not only um people holding patents but the maybe the projects
companies that are maybe potentially infringing and you know the market as a whole with it doesn't
turn into a scare crashing things well let's walk through it. I just, I think his name was CK.
I was just asking him if he was on a cell phone. He said he was in a very colorful fashion, of
course. And Apple has about maybe 1500 patents that they're using to be able to legally sell
the cell phone. And there are certain things they didn't do legally, at least according to the holder of the patent. One is the heart rate medical information for the Apple Watch, which the patent holder, which is a very, very small company, won an ITC, the International Trade Commission, and forced Apple to remove that functionality from the watch.
Now, Apple did not have to remove the functionality.
The patent holder was asking Apple
to pay for their property. Apple chose not to pay for their property or alleged that they weren't
using their property. I'm not going to get into the merits of the case, but notice if Apple would
have paid them what they asked for and what they asked for was legitimate, you wouldn't even known
about it. And you'd have had an Apple watch with even more functionality than they had in the past.
And you'd have had an Apple Watch with even more functionality than they had in the past.
If you're using a Samsung or a Chinese Android or Apple phone to have this conversation,
or if you're using a laptop, Bluetooth 6, or Wi-Fi or anything else, you're using a cornucopia of patents.
Has your machine crashed?
Has the price of your cell phone dropped to zero?
Of course not. The only time you
have a problem is when you use somebody's property without consent, without paying for it, and they
ask you to stop. That's when you have a problem. As for crashing, most of the crashes are the
businesses or the companies that are either using the property without permission or who spend a lot of money to
develop the property and couldn't defend it. But from the end user perspective, patents are very,
very bullish because it allows something like Bitcoin to go from 2009 alpha beta code to 2025
with the Lightning Network and partially signed Bitcoin transfers etc.
and you have more capable chains such as Ethereum and based on top of Ethereum
and you know Hashgraph and Federa and go on down the list none of these
developers invented all this stuff themselves and even if they could it
would take them a lifetime to do it so if you're gonna going to go fast, you have to use technology at hand.
And unless you're the smartest group in the entire world, times 45,000, chances are somebody else invented it.
So if you want to use it, you license it.
You want to go past the toll booth, pay you $1.50.
You want to drive through the gate and break it open and outrun the cops and take your chance in court with a judge. Be my guest. But a dollar 50 is a lot easier.
So does that answer your question?
That does.
And one other thing in terms of things crashing.
Now I gave an example of the DATS, the digital asset treasuries and the ETFs,
et cetera. They have, you know,
they work with financial engineers. I'm a financial engineer. That's my background and training,
financial engineering and corporate valuation. I short things that are overpriced and I find
things that are underpriced and I make things if I can't find something to short or go long.
Okay. I got into technology because I'm a nerd. I got into Bitcoin in 2013. When you purchase an asset as if it is a financial asset, but in reality,
it's a technology, you have to assume the technology risk or you assume it by default,
but you have to recognize that you've assumed the technology risk. I look at all these ETFs and all these DATs and all these ABCs and XYZs, and there's very,
very little disclosure or disclaimers about the technology risk.
The technology risk is by far the strongest risk because it's a technology.
Everything else is secondary and tertiary.
So that's where I could see a significant drop.
But that's a business operation drop.
That's not truly a financial risk. That's a business management risk because freedom of operator analysis were
never conducted. And in any other industry, the first thing they ask when you're selling somebody
something and someone comes to buy it, they say, well, is it yours to sell? Okay. I'm done now.
They say, well, is it yours to sell?
Okay, I'm done now.
Yeah, well, Reggie, one more question.
And thank you for taking the time here.
There are so many people in this industry, they're just building.
They've got their heads down.
They're taking technologies.
I think at the end of the day, a lot of people, especially like devs,
because I've been in the builder space for a very long time, I don't think they mean to infringe if they are.
You know, I just think these are passionate kids that are building and, you know, they're trying to build the next innovative technology.
They're experimenting things, even from my side with building and incubating projects at Lunar Digital Assets, which is our full stack blockchain venture studio.
We have used open source software.
Now, I'm wondering, where do people go to figure out, besides like obviously receiving something in the mail that says hey you know you're infringing on xyz where can people go uh in the blockchain space and i know in the traditional
world uh there's like websites and things you know to figure out you know what's what's patented
what's not and with with the growing number of blockchain technologies being patented
all around the world in different jurisdictions, I mean, how does someone navigate this so that
they can at least take this into consideration? It's called the freedom to operate analysis,
FTO. You hire a lawyer that specializes in intellectual property and other things
surrounding that space and you ask them the same question you asked me. I'm
starting a business, we're gaining traction, I want to know if it's legal
for me to actually build here and if not what can I do about it? You know you can
build around if you find out it's patented, you have three options.
Okay.
You can build around the technology.
You can pay the people to use their technology if they're willing to sell it to you.
Right.
And most are unless you're a direct competitor.
Or you can steal it.
Okay.
Now, if you steal it there are consequences you could pay you know there's punitive damages
for realful infringement because if it's shown that hey you knew this was mine you knew that
was my car and you got in the driver's seat and drove off anyway well you have the car until and
if you get caught and if you get caught it'd be highly unrealistic for you to assume there'd be
no consequences because you willfully stole it if you did it by it'd be highly unrealistic for you to assume there'd be no consequences because you've willfully stolen.
If you did it by mistake, unless the patent holder is an absolute jerk, you're like, okay, no problem.
License and technology go about your business.
And then the third option is to engineer around it.
So if you need a car and you have to steal somebody's car, you can invent a different mode of transportation.
need a car and you have to steal somebody's car you can invent a different
mode of transportation with most patents that are super duper narrow and
specific that's doable as long as you have the budget but there are patents
called foundational pens that happen to cover multiple industries because they
cover a way of accomplishing things and not a specific you know finite method a good example
would be Google's page rank or the guy that created Amazon can't think of his
name but Amazon's out one click purchase yeah Bezos yes and there's a
cornucopia of foundational patents the gene splicing patent which everybody's
fighting over right now because you know that is the future for real you know you
can create disease or cancer proof genes etc etc so a foundational patent is
basically a patent that is either too expensive or unrealistic or impossible
to engineer around but anybody who
has a foundational patent will likely be forced to license it because the government will say this is
a national good so you don't have to give it away for free but you do have to license it you cannot
tell the rest of the world you can't use it hey i've got a quick question for you sorry
you have to um it was just about like if you think that there's any harmful or overuse of patents, specifically patent squatters, people who get the patents for things but then never do anything to actually develop that product and instead just sit on the patent for it, waiting for somebody else to use it. Do you think that there's any way around that? Do you think that's harmful?
Well, that's a difficult question because you get into good or bad. So let's suppose you have a
17-year-old kid who comes up with a new way of, hey, he's able to cure cancer, okay? And
he gets a patent, he's on his his 18th birthday but he sits on it and
so everybody say but you're wasting this you know you should go to hell blah blah blah blah and the
reality is he's 18 years old and he doesn't have the third the seven million dollars to enforce
his patent it's a matter of fact he has 70 until he gets a job at walmart so is he a bad person
$20 until he gets a job at Walmart. So is he a bad person?
No, no, of course not. So that's one perspective. There's another perspective where you have a guy who's just an asshole and
you know, he purchases patents from that 17 year old and he just hunts people with them.
So that's legal and it's a business model, but I can't necessarily say that adds to the value of the world on a global basis.
Do you think that there's any way around it to continue to enforce patents, but to do something so that people like the asshole can't patent squat in the way that they have well if there is you can do the invention yourself
or you can make sure that people who do the invention have the liquidity to hold on to their
invention see a lot in the news you have a lot of uh mantra about uh patent trolls etc but they're
by far the minority of the population, right?
The majority of the population are patent pirates. Those are big companies that use small companies or individual inventors inventions
without their will and they benefit and make billions or hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars from it
And they do that because they know that the 17 year old simply doesn't have the capital to compete
Okay, and that's what happens the vast majority of the time but 17-year-olds don't own magazines you know they don't own Coindesk or New York
Times or Wall Street Journal and they don't have access to it so nobody ever Yeah, my concern is that going down this patent rabbit hole is that, you know, I joined the blockchain space because of the innovation and, you know, the punk rock kind of vibe of, of disrupting the status quo.
And my only concern with patents, which I, I fully understand, you know, that they comes to a point where you're a developer and you've built something and it's really great and you didn't know you were infringing, you know, when you build that stack out so far, it's kind of hard to build around it later on.
later on, you know, because you've built so far and on top of, you know, let's say a particular
technology. And I am worried that this whole patent thing turns into a problem that actually
ends up hurting innovators. And so I just hope that this all goes well, you know, in the future when and if people try to start respecting these patents or realize that they're a bigger thing and the precedent that it all sets, you know, for the future of innovation, blockchain technologies, you know, no one owning the network kind of thing, but everyone owning it together.
I just wanted to interject real quick because, you know, like that's always been a, you know, I used to be a big anti-intellectual property guy until actually Bitcoin.
It was Bitcoin itself that made me realize that like, oh, non-physical property can be owned and leveraged by people.
And then realizing that, oh, OK, well, if that's the case, then all kinds of non-physical property are probably also real and valuable for similar reasons.
And there's a lot to extrapolate from that.
But it's also looking at societies that value intellectual property, have a tendency to invent everything.
And then societies that don't value intellectual property, so like namely China, India, and a few other places,
that they just kind of say, oh, well, we'll just, you know, we'll steal people's IP.
And generally, I mean, what's the quality generally of things made in those places?
Is there, you know, decent know decent you know getting better in some
ways uh and in some particular places they're getting a lot better but only with lots and lots
of government funding but truly it gives an incentive for inventors to invent and when
inventors have an incentive to invent for the sake of profit you have a tendency to have a culture
that then attracts people who want to invent
cool things to profit from them and then we all get to benefit from those spillovers but you know
and i don't know if this is actually what reggie is kind of poking at here but there's a few
interesting ip holders in the space but one that i don't think a lot of people are aware of going
on right now and you wouldn't be aware of it unless you read the quarterly reports
of publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies. But there is a company that is a spinoff of RIM,
which was the company that invented BlackBerry. They actually own the patent for, I believe it
is the SIG hash algorithm, like the elliptic curve signing algorithm in Bitcoin. And they've only IP for it since before Bitcoin existed. And it actually kind of begs the question, it kind of points to a couple things about Satoshi Nakamoto's identity, and I won't get into that. various publicly traded mining companies for their use of this Sighash algorithm without
getting any, like they're not getting paid for use of their IP. And they're not really sure who
else to sue for it because commercially, you know, they're the people that are utilizing
that signature commercially and profiting from it. And they're not giving the money that should be owed, in their
opinion, to this company that owns the patent to it. And so it's a really interesting IP case
that, you know, if enforceable, like, I mean, they're a North American, I believe they're a
Canadian entity, actually. But if they were to sue in US court, and I don't think we're at the lawsuit point yet, but I can tell you that the major U.S. publicly traded mining companies have been served paperwork saying, hey, you're violating our IT.
This is our claim.
And these things, they're at the negotiation table right now.
And the publicly traded mining companies are, they're not ignoring it because they cannot ignore it.
And it could end up being a really interesting thing.
But there's also, you know, there's a couple of other really big patent holders in the space that, you know, people aren't aware of, like the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, which is a alliance formed between.
I think it's primarily Jack Dorsey is probably the largest holder, him and his entities, Block and Cash App and some of these other things.
But it also includes companies like Coinbase and Kraken.
I believe Strategy is also a Crypto Open Patent Alliance member.
And so, you know, these are all people that are taking intellectual property and patents in specific very seriously, too.
patents in specific very seriously too they just don't talk about it because they know that there's
a contingent of anarchists in the space that you know absolutely don't want to hear it so you know
you got jack dorsey who pretends to be this cyperpunk guy uh you know and but you know instead
he's actually trying to control uh you know a conglomeration of the largest patent portfolio
related to bitcoin and you know that's that's portfolio related to Bitcoin. And, you know, that's, that's,
that's relevant information to be aware of that, you know,
a guy like Jack just cause he has a beard and likes to code and, you know,
has some new like Bluetooth communication,
bit chat app or whatever. Like he's not a cypher punk. He's a,
he's a guy that was investing millions, perhaps billions. I'm not,
I'm not sure on the figures, but,
but he is the largest investor in the
Crypto Open Patent Alliance because he wants you to have to be a member of the alliance to use
the IP of the alliance. And that's just a thing that's happening that people need to be aware of.
It's not a theoretical. These are the biggest players in the space. It's literally, it's
Jack, it's Coinbase, it's companies like Blockstream also.. I mean, it's literally, it's Jack, it's Coinbase,
it's companies like Blockstream also. So I mean, this is, you know, your alleged cypherpunk people
are their corporates, and they have corporate patent strategies, and they are aligning together
to leverage their corporate patent strategy. And people just need to be aware of it.
I believe Coinbase has between 39 and 100 patents
and they're trying very hard.
And if you look at the books,
Coinbase came after me to invalidate my patents.
Didn't go well for them, but they did.
Gemini, I believe, is a member of COPA.
Gemini has nine stablecoin patents.
Nine.
And if you map Gemini stablecoin patents against the Genius Act,
you'd be like, hmm.
But see, nobody ever reads this because people don't believe in the technology,
the law, and the finance together.
You have to look at global macroeconomics.
You have to look at intellectual property law.
You have to look at regulatory law and securities and commodities law.
You have to look at software engineering. You have to look at regulatory law and securities and commodities law you have to look at software engineering you have to look at finance right those four or five expertises
expertise says whatever the pro that is okay expertise right getting all four of those
together in one room not to mention one one person is extremely expensive and very difficult to do but when you do it you look at the world in a very different place
Okay
There's a lot I can share I just don't want to share it because it causes more problems than you know I need right now
but uh
You know if you and if you are anti-patent your answer you shouldn't even be on this call because you're using a couple of thousand of them.
You also probably would never want to use Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has several patents and inventions incorporated into it, multiple.
And people say, well, who would you go after?
You go after the people who make money from using your invention.
So that wouldn't be, you know, the 19-year-old high school kid in the basement.
That would be someone
who makes what eight nine ten twenty thirty billion dollars a year exactly your invention
got it mic drop yeah yeah really interesting i know we we segued and we often do that here on the aggregated. I also think it's really important to give everyone a platform and it's really interesting. It's really interesting conversation topic, especially because I recently was looking into a lot of this stuff.
recently was looking into a lot of this stuff.
So I thought it was wild how life works like that.
But anyways, we generally wrap things up at the two hour mark.
That's what we've been shooting for.
We're now 11 minutes over.
Nicole, do you want to dive into anything else?
I'm willing to go a little bit longer here.
We have a really interesting
conversation. Not sure if there's also, if we want to segue back to digital asset treasuries and
jump into that. I'll leave it up to you, Nicole.
I'm good to go for as long as the conversation is productive.
So yeah, I mean, you know, we kind of had this idea that this episode would be about digital asset treasuries and macro economics.
We haven't really dove into macro.
I suppose we could like parlay that topic over for another week.
Did you, Aztec, so let me ask you, do you want to get into macro?
No, well, if it happens naturally, definitely.
But I do have a question then on the digital asset treasury, just a topic for everyone here.
What I'm noticing is that on the Bitcoin side of things, there's definitely some companies that have carved out a really good position for themselves and
and uh you know they stand out on the bitcoin digital asset treasury side of things now we're
starting to see that uh get it you know by e and litecoin and in your guys opinion do you think that
Litecoin. And in your guys' opinion, do you think
that more blue chip
assets start to
be incorporated into these investment vehicles? And
does it even get to a point to where
digital assets outside of the top 50
employee market cap are also incorporated.
And what do you guys think about this?
I actually get this question a lot.
And the reason why, especially from a lot of listeners
and people that are interested in the things
that I'm building,
they hope that stats or institutions
are interested in other things outside of bitcoin because
you know they're invested in these things so anyone have any thoughts on this
i think i think as soon as people start getting bored with uh the price of bitcoin and ethereum
and whatever else which again we're talking about the need of Bitcoin and Ethereum and whatever else, which, again,
we're talking about the need of trillions of dollars to come in to keep that kind of
thing interesting.
I mean, this is why there's meme coin season and stuff.
People are like, hey, man, I want to find something that's got a $800,000 market cap
and wants to go to a billion dollars.
I want to make that move.
I want to ride that train.
And so I think that's also a pretty good signal
that the top is in on the concept of a DAT.
But I think we will absolutely get there.
And when we start to get there,
I think people need to have their alarm bells ringing
ringing that they need to exit into more secure assets.
that they need to exit into more secure assets.
Where is that line for you, Kurt?
Is it already there?
Or do we have a lot longer to go?
No, I think we're going to be in a period of basic stagnation. I mean, like the Bitcoin Bitcoin price performance really hasn't been sexy, bought yourself $12,000 Bitcoin or whatever, and then rode it up into this $120,000 zone.
And that's, it's not bad numbers by any means, but it's also not your, you know, 10,000 X that you would have been capable of before 2017.
And so for me, you know, I look at it as very passe. I think the financialization of it and the price performance, the hodl mentality, I think it's pretty boring and it's been boring for kind of a long time.
And so for me, you know, I look at it as very passe.
And, you know, and that's probably a good thing. Like, that's that's actually what we want. Like, I don't want to live in an economy that is permanently volatile and ridiculous, but it also really needs to encourage people to start to do something
useful. So I'll be honest, like I'm mostly bored with that entire aspect of the whole economy.
So for me, like, obviously, I'm still in like, you know, I've got a lot of ASICs and stuff we're
hosting, I want the price of Bitcoin to continue to go up and all of that. But I also like the
idea of it being pretty steady.
Like it would be a really good thing if it just was doing, you know, a few good points a year forever.
Like that's great.
That's the kind of growth that is needed in a steady, stable, growing economy.
And I think that would represent all kinds of other macroeconomic health that we don't currently have.
I think the economy is actually in a very weird spot. The dollar is in a rough spot.
Global everything is in a weird spot.
I'd really like to hope that
things are going to simmer and people want to be happy
and people want to get back to business, but I also don't really see it.
Yeah, interesting take.
Not sure.
I'll wrap up with this question here.
And I'm not sure.
There's some noise happening in the background.
I'm not sure if that's you, Reggie.
I hear like beeping.
I'm sorry.
Coming through.
It's an amazing platform.
I thought I wasn't here.
Oh. No worries. It's an amazing platform. I thought I wasn't good. Oh.
No worries.
No worries at all.
I'll wrap up on this question.
It's something that's been kind of burning in the back of my mind. uh there's different wells and and some miners and i guess macro guys in crypto that have
been suggesting that um the u.s is going so i'm going a little bit macro here nicole
uh anyways it's hard not to and i have have some brilliant people here, so I got to ask this
question.
So what's being suggested or what people believe is going to happen is that some of the rest
of the money that was created, printed during Q, during all the quantitative easing during COVID that's basically just locked, earning like 4% in different vehicles is going to be turned into stable coins and issued almost like stimmy to the american people has anyone
caught wind of this and what are your thoughts on how that will affect the market or the the global
uh i guess the economies of the world and just, I guess, more macro.
Oh, man. And the obvious answer is price inflationary.
And I think that that's going to be a necessity for these legacy administrative systems to basically go on life support as they sunset into these automated digital administrative lists, agentic public protocol constructs.
I mean, it seems like a necessity.
Interest rates are way too high relative to credit risk, in my opinion.
Agree, I think this is where we're headed as well. I'm just wondering if anyone else has thoughts on this
and I agree, Anthem, it seems like it's,
I don't think there's any way out,
all roads lead to inflation, that whole thing.
I do believe that all of the assets that were,
all these blue chip assets,
they're all going to go up
because more money is going to be printed
and a continuation of what we've been seeing
over the last 20 years.
But yeah, anyone else heard about this before I wrap up?
If not, I'm going to call it weekend
and wish everyone a great weekend.
All right, guys.
Well, much love.
It's been a great show.
Darren, are you there no
all right well it's uh it's time to close up i i appreciate everyone that's come out today
we do this every friday and we have different topics that we discuss. It's been a pleasure talking to everyone, talking about DATS today,
also getting into patents.
Really interesting conversation with Reggie there.
And I appreciate everyone's thoughts on all these topics.
Next week, we're doing crypto gaming or Web3 gaming.
So if there's anybody in the audience who has strong thoughts or feelings about that
or wants to recommend a project to come on the space, hit us up.
Oh, Jared's throwing the thumbs up.
I bet I know which projects.
Is one of them me?
Medieval Empires.
Oh, yeah, it's on our list.
You betcha. medieval empires oh yeah it's on our list you bet there we go i think uh nerd girl i think i got a couple for you too so let's let's have it be um definitely hit me up absolutely yep all right happy happy weekend
everybody i'll see everybody soon thank you great to have you here kurt i always love
uh your your thoughts and thanks for
hanging out with us today.
And Jared, yeah, definitely
send some over, whoever
you got as well.
And this is going to be, we actually haven't
done gaming in a while,
so it'll be fun to catch up on
how the...
We always say that we're like opening 2049, because we
know the DeFi PE guys are away.
Hello?
Oh, yeah, there you're back.
Hello?
Oh, I rugged.
I got some type of national warning, emergency warning,
some kind of weather thing came up on my phone.
But anyways, what did I miss?
Just Darren saying that we haven't done gaming in a while.
Or you said that, actually.
And then Darren said, you know, we saved it for when the big conferences are going on
because that's when the DeFi guys and a lot of people are traveling for conferences.
Definitely.
Definitely.
And it's always a good show.
So good times, guys.
You're welcome to join us next Friday.
We'll be here.
And much love.
Until next time.
Bye, everybody. Thank you.
