Bankless - “Why I’m Bullish” | Mike Novogratz

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

The herd is coming, or is it already here? Mike Novogratz needs no introduction for long-time crypto natives. For those that are newer? Mike is a fund manager who was early to bitcoin, very early to ethereum, built an entire digital assets empire called Galaxy Digital and spent the last 10 years evangelizing crypto to Wall Street and more recently, to DC. We cover how Crypto has evolved from 2014 to 2024, what’s Wall Street’s current perception of our industry, the recent ETH ETF launch, Politics and Macro. Mike also ends the episode giving extremely important advice for young investors so stay tuned. ------ 📣 SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠  🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ⚡️ FUEL | EARN FUEL POINTS https://bankless.cc/fuel  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT  https://bankless.cc/toku  ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/38?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E  ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 4:46 The Herd is Here 14:49 What Changed 20:07 Crypto on Wall Street 32:39 ETH ETF 39:39 Politics 51:27 Macro Outlook 58:10 ETH Narratives 1:03:34 Advice for Youngsters 1:08:20 Galaxy 1:10:24 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Mike Novogratz https://x.com/novogratz   Galaxy https://www.galaxy.com/   ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠  

And so I think for our industry, why I'm so bullish is I think they're both going to come in. They want these voters. My dog thing resonated. I got greened all over the place. No. There are 55 million dog owners in America and they're 85 million crypto owners. That's a crazy stat. We are at political force.

Welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is Ryan John Adams. I got a solo episode for you today. David is out. I'm here to help you become more bankless. The question today, why is Mike Novogratz bullish? We'll answer that in today's episode. Mike, of course, probably needs no introduction for longtime bankless listeners and crypto natives. But for those that are newer, Mike is a fun manager. He was early to Bitcoin. He was very exceedingly

early, one of the earliest to Ethereum. And he's since built an entire digital asset empire. It's called Galaxy Digital. And he spent the last 10 years of his life. So that's an entire decade evangelizing crypto to Wall Street. At times they thought he was crazy. At times he was prophetic in a good way. And more recently, he's been spending some of that time in D.C. It's always a treat to hear from Mike. And this is actually his first time on the bankless podcast after all these years. A few things we talk about. The Progress of Crypto. Why Larry Fink of BlackRock pivoted. The impact of the ETFs. Why Kamala Harris will pivot pro-crypto. If Trump will make Bitcoin a reserve asset and what that would mean, keeping crypto bipartisan or at least nonpartisan, why he's bullish, the macro environment in general,

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With Toku's guidance, you can concentrate on building your company while Toku handles the logistics. Token launches don't have to be complicated. Talk to Toku today to get a free initial token valuation. Bankless Station, Mike Novogratz, is the founder and CEO of Crypto Investment Company. It's called Galaxy Digital. He's always brought, I would say,

some big trad investing energy to crypto. He was president of Fortress. He spent some time at Goldman Sachs, but I think he's pretty unique among his colleagues in that he saw crypto just about before everyone else on Wall Street. Mike, great to have you on Bankless. How you doing? I'm doing all right. Busy week. Yeah, it's been a busy week. It's been a busy year. I want to start with this question with respect to where we are in the trajectory of crypto because I feel like you've played a pretty key role in preaching, let's call it the good word of crypto to traditional investors. I don't know how you're feeling these days, 2024. Are you still feeling like a profit in the wilderness, like evangelizing to people who thought

you were crazy? Like, how does it feel this time around? In some ways, I almost feel like, you know, my mission or my contribution is getting long in the tooth. Yeah? And that, you know, how many times can they hear the same baldheaded guy tell the Bitcoin story or tell the prospect of the promise of crypto? We're at the launching pattern.

You know, I started this expression, the herd is coming. And I was about five years, six years, seven years too early. They're here. You know, we've had the first ETF with Bitcoin. Now we've got the Ethereum ETF. We have a huge change of heart around the politics of crypto. I mean, this Bitcoin National Conference is going to be electric. Donald Trump is the great opportunist who says, hey, they're 10 million single-issue voters. I want them. Yeah. And so there's rumor he is going to announce a strategic reserve for Bitcoin. What? I think that would make the price go significantly higher. Like, who would have thought?

in the wildest dreams. And all of a sudden, you know, listen, I don't know if he will. I haven't seen his speech. I know Kennedy is speaking before him. He's very pro-crypto. It's an all-star lineup out there. I know Cynthia Lummis is giving a speech and there's potential that she's going to prop something in her bill. And so you could see this build on it. And I would also tell you that the Democratic presumptive nominee Kamala Harris and her people are saying, wait a minute, I can't not be, you know, she's from San Francisco. She understands the benefit of tech in terms of growth. And so I am very certain the Dems are going to make a big pivot on saying, hey, the Biden administration was wrong on this. Let's dump Gary Gensler. Let's be

tech and innovation forward. And so all of a sudden we've got two parties, they're going to start fighting over us pariahs. And it's pretty freaking exciting. And so, you know, it'll be interested you could do a second podcast next week to see if all this plays out. But it's got the market, really excited. And I think, listen, if Trump announces it, it's a game changer. Prices are a lot higher. You know, then there's a call it a 55% chance he wins right now, or call it 50-50. And then if he wins, does he follow through? Probably 80%. But if he follows through, there's probably an 80% chance of other central banks and reserves start buying it. And all of a sudden, what we thought was kind of fun to talk about, 500,000, 600,000, 700,000 crypto actually is in the realm of possibility. And, you know, 700,000 crypto is gold.

It's roughly the market cap of gold, right? 14 trillion, something around there. Maybe gold's a little higher now because gold price went up. But like that seemed like fantasy. And now there is a, it's not base case, but it's a possibility. And so that's pretty freaking exciting. It's crazy. And how quickly it's all happened. And I do want to get back to politics in the 2024 election, because that seems to be a catalyst. But what you're just talking about is there's the potential. This episode will go out on Monday of next week, Mike. We're recording this on a Wednesday, the 24th. So it goes out on Monday the 29. We're going to look prophetic or foolish. Exactly, which is the perfect place to be.

That's the line you want to balance, I think. So prophetic and foolish, which maybe that's a summary of your crypto evangelism. But it's been more prophetic than it has been foolish. And I want to ask, So we're talking about the potential of a major political, like potentially the next president of the United States announcing a strategic Bitcoin reserve, okay? That's what you were just talking about. And you were talking about how bullish that would be. Okay. So coming back to that.

But like when you said the herd was coming, like back in 2017, I recall you saying that, is that what you meant? Do you think the herd would actually be central banks? Because I got the impression you were more talking about like whales and tradfai and like institutional investors. I was talking about the black rocks. Yeah. And I think the single most important thing that's happened to crypto in the last two years is Larry Fink being orange-pilled.

And, you know, it wasn't just one person, one person led it. It was a collection of people. But they orange-pilled them, just like every other person that's ever bought in Bitcoin. Every single person that has bought in Bitcoin has been convinced to join this community of light-minded people to take some of their hard-earned wealth and trust it in this technology and community. It's not just a technology, right? We could have Adams coin. We could hack the, you know, fork the Bitcoin blockchain and call it Adams coin. And maybe your mother and your uncle would store some welfare.

I don't think so. I don't even think they believe in Adams coin, honestly. It's the social construct. It's people selling the story to each other. And so that's what's so unique about this. It is an active community. And the only way it grows is that people in the community figure out how they should contribute. Listen, there are a ton of free riders.

I used to think I should put a tip jar on my Twitter because I'm out there preaching. Yeah. You know, I don't get paid extra to preach, right? I own Bitcoin. Bitcoin goes higher. I make money. If I didn't preach, I'd still own Bitcoin.

And so I always think it's essential for people to figure out how they can participate in that community. Again, they're free riders, but most people, you could be core developers, you could be, or you could orange pull one person. But that's what this phenomenon has been. I got to say the Larry Think, pivot on crypto has kind of caught me by surprise, both at how fast it's happened. And if you're pointing to that as kind of a linchpin, I'd be curious to dig into that. Like, how did that happen?

How did he get orange-pilt? Like, what was it? A group of people sat with him, people that had a lot of his respect from other things they've done in life, sat with him and said, Larry, you're not thinking about this right. Let me explain to you why this is important. And what gets people in Tradfai to understand is something that I think Satoshi must have seen. It's not in the white paper, but he must have seen it. Right. Post-08, what came out of 08 and the reaction was a move to populism. What was the reaction in 08? It was bail out the hedge fund guys, bail out the insurance companies, and, oh, we're going to have a lot of people lose their houses. And so if you're a little guy, you're like, this system's no fair. That's the beginning of saying, screw.

this, screw the system. Screw the system. And Satoshi's paper was a screw the system paper. And it's like, we don't trust the system. Populism is coming. So what does populism end up being in political terms? It means I'm going to spend more and I'm going to spend more and I'm going to spend more. Donald Trump was the first populist president we've had in my lifetime, right? We had neoliberal politics. George Bush, Bill Clinton, their policies were really damn similar. Donald Trump was like spending. And then Joe Biden came in and kind of hijacked by the progressives. He's like, I got to spend more. I got to get people pay off medical debt, pay off college debt, right? And so we've had this reckless spending since 2016. There's no end in sight. And so when you're Larry think, you say, if you're going to see dollar after dollar after dollar printed, it's going to debase the dollar and let me buy something like gold or silver. Bitcoin is just digital gold. And I've always believed we should keep the story that simple. It's not going to be payments. It's not going to be just digital gold. We're not going to buy our tennis shoes in Bitcoin, right? Because we think it's going higher. It's going to buy your tennis shoes and something you think is going higher. But if it's a place that average Americans and average Sudanese people and average Egyptian people can take some of their hard-earned wealth and store it and feel like it's safe because they trust this code and they trust this community, it's not just a code. It's the community. It's the community. that participates in the code. And I think that's, you know, one guy told him that he brought in experts,

and Larry met with a lot of smart people, including people at his own firm, and said, I get it. And he's also very good at reading the tea leaves. You know, hey, if this is going to be important, BlackRock needs to participate. And so all of a sudden, they help credentialize, right? My hope with Galaxy was always that we'd be a credentializer, that we'd pick the right projects, that people would trust us, and that would bring people into these ecosystems. What do you mean by that, credentialize? Just give legitimacy. Give legitimacy.

Yeah, okay. So listen, I have bet on some projects that have sucked, and that, you know, does not do good things for my reputation. And I've been on some projects that have been great. Sure. And that does better things, right? I bought Ethereum at one. A little bit lucky. Nice.

You know, it's not buying things. It's cheap. It's knowing when to sell them and one not to sell them. That makes you the money. But that was the whole reason we set this company up because, you know, I was already. old and I was already wealthy. So I said, when I go back to work, I want to be able to contribute to a community. So I thought I had something to add. I want to work with young people, a lot of young people in space, and I want to learn new stuff. And it's an unbelievably diverse

field. And so if you're not curious, you shouldn't be in the crypto field. It seems like part of what you're describing with Larry Fink and all of the kind of the other investors and now even presidential nominee is kind of coming over into the crypto camp. It seems to be a tipping point. We just hit this tipping point. It's not just one thing. It's a confluence of factors that have allowed us to achieve it. When you look at 2017, when he used to say the herd is coming to now, 2024, we are like, I guess, seven years later on that journey. What is different about crypto? Yeah, we've hit this tipping point. There's more legitimacy. In what other ways is it different from 2017? Do we now have the infrastructure necessary? Like, what's there's some building that's occurred? Some. But so the big, you know, catalytic change was COVID. Because COVID created the political situation to pump trillions of dollars into the economy, trillions of dollars. And that allowed the story of, oh, shit, we're going to debase the currency to take hold globally.

And so without COVID, we are, you know, we're trading 6,000. Like, I don't know what we're trading. We're trading a lot lower and the energy didn't come into the space. COVID brought the energy into the space. I would not have gotten into this if it was just about Bitcoin. if it was just, hey, we're going to create an alternative to gold, a digital gold. That's just a lot better for a lot of reasons. I was always drawn to the space because this idea that really Vitalik, right, hey, we can not just put money on this blockchain, but we can put smart contracts,

and then we can put anything on. And so I always think Satoshi and Vitalik is my two heroes of this space. Like, I don't know who Satoshi is. They know who Vitalik is, and I think he's just awesome of the way he's held himself, the way he's comported himself, my favorite guy in the whole space. I don't know him well. I met him a few times, but I just watch him. And I'm like, dude, that guy is so wise and so young. But he really gave this idea.

You know, Joe Lubin's my friend. I was a college roommate. I went to his company, and I was like, how can we use this technology to really revolutionize and make the world fair? How can we connect people around the music space to cut out the metalman, ticketing, finance,

all these different areas. And that is starting to happen. It hasn't happened yet, right? It's happening in a great way in payments, right? Verizon stable coins. We're investing a bunch of different payment, you know, companies, cross-border payment stuff. That's, I think, really exciting. And there's some test cases around tokenization. We tokenize the violin. We're working on a stable coin. It really hasn't happened in Nash yet. And the rest of Defi, has been a crypto ecosystem play. What's really exciting in the next few years, we now have blockchains that are fast enough, trusted enough, stable enough, that you're going to start seeing real world use cases built on them. But it's hard, right? If in 10 years time, it's Bitcoin and a

casino, we've all made a lot of money. I won't feel nearly as good about myself. I'm like, oh my God, they spent the last chapter in my life building a casino. So for me, for this revolution to really be fulfilling, you've got to see blockchain-based ticketing. You've got to see blockchain-based finance. You've got to say blockchain-based music, right, giving the power back to the people, having peer-to-peer relationships. And it's all about this community. And so that part is plumbing, right? It's getting the plumbing right. It's having the blockchains more robust. You know, it's funny. Blockchains are trust machines, but you've got to teach people how to trust the trust machine. It's actually kind of a messed up concept, right? Van Jones won a big prize from Jeff Bezos,

and he said, I got to spend this money. What can I do? And he thought about blockchain-based voting. And I thought about it, I was like, dude, start with American Idol. Right? Like, no one's going to trust blockchain on voting yet, even though me and you might show them the math that it's a better system. So you've got to bring people into the space where they can understand it and trust it. And at one point, all of it disappears into the back of the TV, right? And so that journey for all of these other protocols and all of these apps that people are working on, it's living in the first inning, right? Bitcoin's in the sixth inning, right? It's just, you know, the majors, it's on its way, right? Bitcoin's a finished product. Nothing has to change for it to be an awesome product. It's got a role in every portfolio

in the world. But when's the last time you bought something on a blockchain? right? You know, we don't even in the U.S. We don't use blockchain-based payments because fucking Apple pay works like a gem, right? But if we lived in Venezuela or, you know, some parts of Africa, we'd be sending each other tether on Toronto. Yeah, so a lot

of this tipping point, I guess, it has to do with narratives, narratives being understood and then also like use cases. And I think you're right, like Bitcoin from the network perspective and a narrative perspective is kind of there. It's reached sort of saturation points, fully understood. It's like more of a

finished product, Ethereum is a little bit different and everything that comes downstream of Ethereum as well. I think, Mike, one prism maybe to look at this and talk about this is through the lens of ETFs, because I have noticed that TradFi is getting a bit more bullish on crypto as it has products to sell, okay? Larry Think swung bullish on crypto after we had the I shares BlackRock Bitcoin ETF, didn't he? And now he's gotten Ethereum ETF. And so I'm curious to like when Tradify has products to sell, do they generally get more bullish? Like validate that for me or tell me that that's BS. Ryan, it's a great insight.

It's a great insight. Yeah, okay. Listen, even in my own company, you know, we have always been great investors or at least very good investors, both in venture and macro and owning tokens and selling when they go high and buying when they go low.

But our trading desk didn't have much to offer people for a while. Yeah. Right? And say, like, oh, damn it, his business is hard. And now we're the biggest derivative player in the space. You know, when we participate in the FDX,

restructuring. We were a big player in buying FDX at a discount and bringing customers in that way. And it's amazing how the faces light up of the salesmen when they have something to sell. And so it's 100 percent. You get more enthusiastic when you start making money. And the industry is at the point where it's big enough that people are making money, not just by owning the underlying, but by bringing people into the tent, by transacting with them, by lending against it.

And so you need people to make money and feel utility. both fuel utility, oh, this is great to use it and make money doing it to create energy. And so I think the next big thing to happen is post this election, no matter who wins, you're going to get some version of an infrastructure, a market structure bill passed, Fit 21, Volume 3. And I'm praying and I'm thinking you're going to get new direction at the OCC, and the remnants of choke point 2.0 gets wiped off the table. And all of a sudden, Goldman Sachs and Citibank and Morgan Stanley and Jeffries all starts saying,

hey, go hire me some of those guys that work at Galaxy. You know, the headhunter's calling. And they're building these desks. Then you'll actually see a lot more activity. And so I'm like, I think about it two ways. I'm like, shit, the competition is going to get so much harder. But good, it's going to drive me so many more people. because those organizations, they get more charged up and they're bringing their giant institutions with them.

And as much as I think Galaxy is a world-class company, most clients would rather deal with Goldman than Galaxy. They trust it, it's pure balance sheet. I mean, it's just that's human nature. And so I want the giants to participate because I realize it just will bring a lot of energy to our space. The space, why is energy important? Like, Bitcoin drives everything because it pushes money into, other places. It's the other places that need to get built out so they can fulfill their destiny, right? I want blockchain-based ticket. My favorite story of all of crypto, it's like 2015,

I got a call from Adam Clayton, the bass player of you two. I thought it was a prank call. I thought it was my brother pranked me. And he's like, dude, I listen to your podcast, come to the concert. No way. So I go out, I literally go out to Frickin the Metallands with a buddy. Go backstage. I meet Bono the Edge, you know. And he's like, oh, we played your freaking podcast on our jet right out here. And I was talking about the idea of blockchain-based ticketing in NFTs in 2015. They weren't called NFTs. You know, the real breakthrough of Satoshi was that he was the first person to put private

property on the Internet. Before Satoshi, there was no private property, right? You could control copy-paste. And so having uniqueness actually is private property. And so I was like, oh, you're going to have tickets. You'll be able to have these tickets. And you'll be able to throw them from the stage to the guy who's sitting on. in the top row and he'll catch them on his phone and he'll come down and get the front row seats

because they hated empty front row seats. And I'm giving them all this, Jasbataz, and they're all excited. And it's eight years later we don't have blockchain-based ticketing. And so I'm not going to be happy until we have projects that actually get to scale. Why don't we have it? Because Ticketmaster doesn't want it. And it's hard to beat the incumbents. We don't have blockchain-based ride share because Uber doesn't want it. And so how does a community compete against, you know, a giant, right? Why Facebook still dominates and TikTok dominates social. We don't have distributed social. We don't have, right, decentralized social. And so in lots of the verticals, we've gotten smoked. The question is, in five years, as this place gets more energy, as Bitcoin price goes up and

drives money into the whole space and Goldman gets involved and more and more people, bring more and more people in, do these projects finally get enough critical mass and funding to take on the incumbents? Yeah, I think one way that maybe we can get more traction with the incumbents is the playbook that Bitcoin has used, which is basically give them a product to sell. Once they have a product to sell, Bitcoin is not competitive with BlackRock or these other asset issuers. If they can issue an ETF, and maybe we can do something similar with the ticket masters of the world. Maybe there's a way to tokenize their ticketing, that kind of thing. And like, coming back to kind of like tradfai's interest in crypto, which is really taking like a positive

turn this year. I mean, the Bitcoin ETF, my perception of it from the outside looking in, it wasn't just like a product that launched. It was like the Beatles of ETF products. Like this is what ETF people tell me that this is not like a minor launch. This was the greatest launch in history. Yes. So think about this. Like I talked about this a lot in 2017 in that great first bubble, right? In the history of the world, we had never had a global speculative mania, right? We had the NASDAQ bubble. It was a U.S.-based tech bubble. Mr. Mr. Watnavi in Japan or Mr. Mrs. Sikh in, you know, northern India, they were participating, right? In the railroad bubble, it was a U.A. space bubble. In the tulip bubble, it was, you know, based in Amsterdam.

Crypto was the first global product. You have Japanese bond. British bonds, European bonds, U.S. bonds, Mexican bonds. We had Bitcoin. It was a global product. We went from, you know, they're 330 million Americans. They're 8.2 billion people. And so the global nature of this space for a crypto junkie feels normal. It ain't normal. Right? Tell me what the fifth biggest stock in the Korean stock market is. You got no idea. Right? The Koreans know. Right? But you can tell me what the top four cryptocurrencies are, probably the top 10. And so we don't want to underestimate how important that is. And so for the U.S., why Bitcoin ETF is so important as well, it was the first time the government said, you have our blessing. Gary Ganser said it with pepper in his mouth and, you know, a gun in his back. He didn't want to say it, but he was forced to say it. And, you know, a lot of credit goes to the great scale guys.

they did a lot of things wrong, but in this case, they did something right where they went on that lawsuit and said, what are you guys talking about? I can't say there's a future. It makes no sense. And, you know, that costs money to do those lawsuits. And so I tip my hat to that team. But it's the first time the U.S. government said, crypto's good. We got your blessing. That's my Pope thing. And that was really important. And, you know, we're going to see now, less than two years later, by the time it's all set and done, two years post that ETF launch, the U.S. is going to be all in on crypto. We'll have good regulation, we'll have rules, and we'll have, you know, I remember I was talking a tradfai guy who had a major, major job, and he went to a big crypto company, and he said,

he called me after about three months. He said, dude, I'm seeing these people I used to talk to all the time, and I show up and they look at me like I'm a criminal. And, you know, he ran a big business. and I was like, yeah, welcome to our world, right? Like, we were treated like pariahs in lots of ways. I mean, maybe it'd meet a little less because I'm such a loudmouth. But all of a sudden, the time is, you know, the government has said, no, no, this is a good industry.

And I think there's going to be an unbelievable unleashing of energy the moment this stuff gets codified, the moment we pass the law, the moment you see Gary Gaines are not at the SEC, the moment frivolous lawsuits aren't being. And listen, I'm not saying crypto wasn't. and guilty of a lot of shit. It still is guilty of a lot of shit. I literally have up to 10 to 15 impostors a week between Facebook, TikTok, you know, LinkedIn and all these things. People trying to scam and fish money from, you know, that never happened to me as a macro guy, zero point zero times. And so, you know, the crypto world has been full of, you know, shady deals. I looked at one tweet I had

from a few years back that was like, oh my goodness, you know, Doe Kwan and S&Chi. Sam Bankman-Fried are becoming the next CZs, like unbelievably innovative, unbelievably charismatic, all three of the guys go to jail. That doesn't happen in TradFi very often, is what you're telling me? You know, we deserve some of the spanking we got as an industry. But what feels good is that most of that's behind us, and we're getting a clean bill of health from the government soon. and I think, you know, the next five years are going to be a lot more fun than the last five.

I think what's needed in crypto is going to change when you said, how you do it? I said, well, I'm a storyteller. And I think storytelling will still be important, but plumbing is going to be just as important. Literally, and being an entrepreneur is going to be just going to be, literally being strategic, how do you take on Ticketmaster as a community? What does it take to jumpstart a blockchain business? based ticketing company or we'll never have one, right? The same thing that Travis Kulachanik had to do when he took on the taxi cab drivers. I remember I sat with him about a year ago for a couple hours

and I was like, oh, now I know why the decentralized Uber didn't work and he built Uber. The guy's a complete and total renegade badass. And he didn't mind being sued. He paid fines. He paid for demand. He paid for supply. He was an amazing salesman to bring in capital. And it took a tremendous amount of will, rule breaking, and toughness to jumpstart that company, which is now, you know, one of the best companies in the world. Quite frankly, the interesting is it's probably now easier to disrupt it that it's built than it was before. But that's really the next chapter of this. It's going to be entrepreneurs and plumbers and less storytellers, I think. Well, it's going to be a massive amount of opportunity for entrepreneurs who kind of see that

future. It's going to also feel if your projection is true in two years' time, America kind of Pivot's pro-Cryptos, going to feel so good to be out of the U.S. regulatory spanking machine. Let me tell you. Let's talk about a story. Let me tell you, actually. Yeah, I'm sure. Let's talk about a story. So, you're a storyteller, Mike. Ethereum got an ETF this week. That's speaking of guns behind Gary Gensler forcing me to do things. The Ethereum ETF was not on my bingo card this year. Let me tell you. Like, that caught me by a surprise. And I think a lot of people in crypto by surprise. Now it's released. Now it's out. What do you think about that? And what kind of story do you tell? about ether the asset.

Yeah. So listen, I think why that happened is pretty clear. Trump started talking about Bitcoin and Democrats realized, what the hell are you doing? I feel a little bit of Schengen Freud in that I'm a Democrat. I was down in D.C. over and over. I think, this is the stupidest policy I've ever seen. You are literally like the party against dogs. They're more crypto owners than dog owners.

And you're like, we hate dogs. I was like, stop. Like, it's a technology. Don't make it so personal. But no one listened to me until, you know, Trump said, hey, I think I like crypto. So DC said, we got to change. It's election. We got to change.

And so you saw the Sab 121 and the Fit 21, both votes. I saw a lot of Democrats shift. You saw Schumer vote, you know, against the majority. You saw the SEC pivot really quickly. I don't know if that was a call from the White House or they just were like, I can feel the political stance shifting. Let's throw them a bone. They were going to lose the lawsuit anyway.

they could have dragged it on for six more months, and I figured the rationale was probably, we know we're going to lose because we lost in Bitcoin, we could drag it on for the next six months to the next term, but it's good for the Democrats to not be so anti-cryptum, right? I mean, you know, I went out to D.C. two weeks ago to meet with one of the president's most senior advisors. She was trying to hear, you know, how can we help? And she was met with a very loud and direct, you guys get a D minus to an F. Yep. And I remember, I'd like to give you the line. I said, I was in the military. I was on the Olympic team. I'm a patriot. I'm a Democrat. And I've never been treated more on America than how I've been treated as a crypto entrepreneur. Wow. You said that. Oh, I was like, Mr. Smith fucking goes to Washington. But I wasn't the only one. Everybody laid in. And to be fair, she was very polite. And she was like, wow. And then you could tell like, we're like, yes, that bad. Your economic policy advisor, Elizabeth Ford, has an anti-crypto army banner ad. I was like, maybe start by distancing yourself from that.

And so I think, you know, the Biden administration got to this way too late. Right. What you have to understand about politics is this is so important to us. And it's a pimple on the elephant's ass to most people. Right. And so until it became political. And, you know, listen, Ryan Selkis has kind of lost his mind on Twitter recently. He's been so adamant and angry and whatnot. But he gets some credit on this, right? got on stage with Trump and he pushed Trump and he helped make it political, the Dems wouldn't care about this until it got political. And now they care a lot. And it wasn't that all the Dems, I went down to D.C. for the last three years. They're unbelievable advocates for us, Richie Torres, Jake Ockin-Claas, even a King Jeffries was biased our way the whole time. You know, they got 50

things they're voting on that wasn't that important when Elizabeth Warren held the banking committee She had all the cards in this one. And until it became political, now she's been denuded, defanked. Again, one person doesn't do this that takes community. I think there's been a lot of people. You know, Mark Cuban, Brian Armstrong has put a ton of money with the Coinbase team down in D.C. And so all of that stuff and our broader community speaking up is what's forcing this change. The Uniswap extension is here.

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friction-free. Visit arbitram.io and get your journey started in one of the largest Ethereum communities. Okay, so that's how we got the Ethereum ETF. Let's come back to the Ethereum ETF later. I want to take this side quest on politics for a minute because this is huge in 2024. Like the impact of the election on crypto. So you've described a little bit of like your activity in DC. Now I just like setting the landscape, Trump appears to want to be the pro-crypto president. He's like running on that platform. So as we mentioned, like this week, the week that this episode will come out for bankless listeners, he will be at a Bitcoin conference. Who knows what he's going to talk about, but it's going to be bullish crypto.

The Bitcoin conference, it's not on a normal crypto conference. Right. It's 25,000 hardcore Bitcoiners. Okay, so like, that's surprising to me. I was going to say that's crazy. I guess it's not crazy, but it's very surprising to me. Now we have Biden, who is withdrawn. So it looks like Kamala Harris is going to be stepping up.

Let's talk about the Democrats first, and we'll swing back to kind of the Republicans than GOP. So they did this kind of like maybe throw a bone to crypto, half pivot, but not a full pivot. I mean, Biden vetoed Sab once. 21. We saw that. They haven't said anything about crypto. Do you think Kamala, this is going to be an opportunity for Kamala Harris to kind of reset the agenda on crypto? Do you think they'll swing pro-crypto? I made a tongue-in-cheek bet with Potter Winklevoss on Twitter yesterday that I think that in the next six weeks you will hear Kamala Harris talk about being an innovation president, talk about pro-crypto,

talk about getting rid of Gary Gensler, talking about getting big financial institutions involved in making the U.S. a leader in crypto. And if she does, he's got to drink three beers in 15 minutes. And if she doesn't, I will drink three beers. At PubKee, our favorite Bitcoin bar in New York City. So you think that's happening. You think that's already written? I said this on Fox and on CNBC yesterday. We haven't seen Kamala Harris for three and a half years, right? She has had a very non-active vice presidency. And so she's going to now sell herself to the American public. If she sells herself as the liberal senator who had the 99th most liberal voting record in the Senate from California, the most liberal state, she's going to lose. If she reads the temperature of the country, if she reads the temperature of the party and pivots to the center, picks a Mark Kelly as her vice president, which I think she will, maybe announces a secretary of treasury in advance to bolster her economic credibility, talks about how she's going to make the country better.

I think she's going to win. And so I honestly think we're hedged. We're either going to have Trump win, who's already said I'm all in on crypto with J.D. Vance, who's all in on crypto, right? And for the industry itself, probably better. But I think we're going to have the Democrats who are going to say, hey, we're going to be pretty damn all in on crypto too. And so it's an unbelievably good spot we're in. For the first time since I've been in this industry since 2013 when I bought my first Bitcoin, which, believe it or not, is 11 years ago, which is insane. I cannot believe I've been talking about Bitcoin for a little break in years. My wife's like, guess something new to talk about. So we literally, it's almost like we checkmated the political situation.

What would you have to see to, like, make that true? Like, so what kind of pivot are you looking for her to say, hey, I'm going to like fire Gary Gensler as much as that? Yes. I support Sab 121 repeal and Biden said it was like was a mistake. I think it's going to be broader. I am going to be a pro-crypto president. She says that, something like that. I think she's going to say something like that. She grew up in San Francisco. Like, she's from the innovation capital of the world.

She knows the job. I know, Mike, it's just the thing is, like, Gary Gensler. You know, Gensler was talking about blockchain at MIT. We thought he would be the pro-crypto SEC. There's something happens when they get in there that just changes them. Crypto wasn't political. No one cared about it back then other than us. It's now on the main stage, right?

I have been very active in this whole move to get Biden out. And I've been talking to tons of people in D.C., and I'm telling you, these conversations are happening. There was a big debate, should she go to the crypto conference or not? And, you know, I think what they probably decided was, it's just too soon. She's just got the nomination. Let her get her bearings instead of going into the lion's den on day five, probably a prudent decision. But I will be surprised.

I'm willing to bet three beers. If you want to join, I can go six. I'll throw up after, I'll probably be fourth. And so I think for our industry, why I'm so bullish is, I think they're both going to come in. They want these voters. My dog thing resonated. It got cleaned all over the place. There are 55 million dog owners in America and they're 85 million crypto owners. That's a crazy stat. We are at political force. Yeah, we are a political force. And there would be incredibly bullish. I would go as far as to say, it's nowhere near

priced in to have two pro-crypto presidential candidates. Like, we've never had that set up going to this. I bought a lot more crypto in the last week. Well, okay, so two pro-crypto candidates, let's say that that comes true. I bet they will be fighting for our vote, and then it's a matter of out-pro-cryptoing each other. And so, like, let's talk about Trump and the GOP and their platform. So they've come out being very pro-crypto, like in addition to preserving rights, like, self-custody of our own private use, like some great material coming out. And if Trump says he's going to put Bitcoin on the balance sheet of the United States of America, Like, how big would that be? How pro-crypto do you think the GOP policy could actually end up being here?

If he says that, and he will say it on Saturday, if he says it, it is the single most bullish thing that's happened to crypto since I bought it at $98 in 2013. Like, what would that mean? Would that mean, like, we are holding- Probably at $100,000 in a week? Right. So would that mean that, by the way, that's probably not a good way to, like, buy things, right? I would imagine from a trading perspective, you don't announce and then buy it. Trump is transactional and he wants to get elected. But that would mean effectively that the U.S. has Bitcoin on its balance sheet to back its monetary policy, yes? I don't think they're thinking about it as strategic as that. I think what he's thinking is,

I'm going to tell people this is important, I'm going to own it because I think it's going to keep going up. It's counterintuitive in some ways. But, you know, we do own gold and we own silver as a country. Now, that happened when the dollar was backed by those things. It would be more logical for a non-reserve currency to do that, right? if you're Mexico or Brazil or China Central Bank, where you're trying to tell people your currency is safer, but when you're the reserve currency, the reserve currency. And that's not how Trump's thinking. He's thinking, I want to show this community they matter to me, right?

That's how you win votes. I want to show this community. And what better way than taking the power of the U.S. government and saying you matter to me? Since you invoked Ryan Selkiss earlier in the episode, you don't have to comment on him specifically. But his strategy has been very much to kind of, of like punish the anti-cry crypto tribe and support the pro-crypto side. And my question to you is,

do you think we really need to pick a tribe here? I think it's horrific. Yeah. So you think crypto should remain nonpartisan. Like, what do you mean by that? It's a technology. And part of it feels libertarian, right? It's about freedom. It's about protecting our privacy. Right. It's about, I can hold them what I want. It's about private property. Right. George Washington said there's no freedom without private property, right? But part of it's very, it's very. But part of it's very fricking progressive. I want to cut out the banks. You know, Chad Pascarilla at Paxos, they launched a stable coin under the Abu Dhabi regulatory framework, a dollar-based stable coin that pays interest. It's the most radical product I've seen since crypto started because it's a bank

account with 5% interest. If you have a JPMorgan bank account right now, what do you think they're paying you in interest? Nothing. Bubcus, right? And so the U.S. dollar, when you own it in your pocket, you got $100 in your pocket. Right now I got $1,000 in my pocket. I'm getting zero interest, right? So the Fed makes all this money on free flow. Banks makes all this money on free flow. If every person in the world who own dollars had a wallet with Chad Stablecoin in it,

they're making all the interest on it, 24 hours a day. And so you talk about being progressive. Now, why is that not going to happen in the U.S.? Because the transition from reserve fractional banking and bankers being the providers of credit to the system and having the bank account in your wallet would be too traumatic. It would wipe out every bank. Like, why in God's name would you keep your money in a bank, which is really a hedge fund that might or might not be guaranteed by the government? We think they're guaranteed. The too big to fail ones by statute you are.

But, you know, Silicon Valley Bank, all these banks, when we had that crisis, Republic Bank, we were praying, oh, God, I hope I got my money back. I have a poor friend that, you know, literally almost had a heart attack over it because this whole net worth was in, you know, Republic Bank. And the last minute, he's trying to move his money out and it got stuck. And, you know, thank God he got his money. Like, if it was all in T-bills in Chad's staple coin. And so crypto can be so progressive. It's crazy, right? Which is traditionally a democratic value.

And so it's got a little of both. And so I've always argued it's a technology platform. It's revolutionary. And it shouldn't be political. And if it's red guys like, blue guys don't, every time the election spins back and forth, and it will go back and forth, our industry is going to, like, lurch one way or the other. And so I've been very adamant. And quite funny, if you look at my political giving this year, I had a fundraiser for Todd Emmer, who is as conservative as you get.

I love Todd Emmer. I think French Hill from Arkansas is one of the smartest guys I've met on Capitol Hill, and I've given him money. You know, Haggerty in Tennessee, the senator who's hosting this whole crypto brouhaha, is straight up, you know, smart as can be and very supportive of crypto. So there are three Republicans that are in checks for. I didn't write any Republican checks eight years ago, right? Because not on this issue, my bias is, you know, more on the center-left side. But I think we need to make this a bipartisan issue. Yeah, and I'm hopeful we do. One thing I would add to that, though, I do very much feel like it's in the Democrats court at this point. One hundred percent.

Maybe they'll choose to do that with Kamala Harris. As a Democrat, it's been embarrassing and disheartening. And what I'm optimistic about is I'm literally seeing the change. and like I said, I wouldn't bet three beers just on a lar. I've got better information than most of you guys. All right. Well, let's talk about some of your information sources with respect to macro. So what does that look like these days? Like, what's your overall macro thesis?

And how does that relate to being bullish? I assume that's your default posture on crypto. Yeah. So you can make it really simple. We are growing our debt too fast. My first real job, not as a gardener, as a bartender, was at the Office of Management Budget. I was 20 years old. I worked at OMB. And this might be the most important thing I say in this whole podcast. I learned then 1984, that's how old I am, that the federal

government is allowed, I put quotation marks, is supposed to spend about 20% of GDP and tries to tax 20% of GDP. We did it in 1999, the only year we've had a balanced budget in the last 30, 40, Clinton president, tech bubble, a lot of tax receipts. So we had a balanced budget in 1999. That was it. Only time we balanced the budget. But it doesn't matter if you were Bush or Clinton, 20% was your budget. Now, you might spend more on military and less on education. You might spend more on education, less on military. That was the balance between Republican and Democrat, right? Where are you going to spend that money? And how you're going to tax it, right? Guys like Steve Forbes said we should have a flat tax. But it was always, how do we get to 20%?

When Trump came into office, he said, screw that. I like spending money. So he expanded government faster than almost any president in history spending. And then COVID happened. And then we felt what we needed to. Right. We ran an experiment in UBI. And it worked. People wanted to get happy. They start spending it. Right. And Biden came in. He's like, oh, my God, I got pushed in by the progressives. And there's a lot of projects I think would be really neat to do. it is a beautiful idea to wipe out people's student debt if money grew on trees, right? And so this idea, even, because inflation had been so low for so long, of modern monetary theory, I think people asked me that.

I was like, when I was seven, my mom told me money didn't grow on trees. But Elizabeth Warren is telling people money grows on trees. It doesn't. It creates inflation. And so between Trump and Biden, what I would say are the two worst presidents in the history of this country, in terms of spending, we blasted out and have norm. So what do you think the federal budget is this year as a percentage of GDP? That's a percentage of GDP. I'm not going to put you on this pay.

It's 26%. Okay. It's supposed to be 20. So 6%, it's literally almost one and a half to two trillion dollars more than they're supposed to be able to spend. And we're not taxing enough. We're taxing 20%. That leaves the 6% budget deficit. Who's going to pay for that?

Your fucking grandkids or your kids. break kids. Forget how old I am. Right. And so the only way to turn that, and this is a long-winded answer, but it's the important thing. I said, this might be the important. The only way to stop that is to cut entitlements. What are entitlements? Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. No politician wants to tell old people, you don't get the money you paid in for. You don't get your hip replacement, right? We have the most inefficient medical system in the world, and those three things, up almost all this money. And so if you don't go for the entitlements, which I don't think anyone will, oh, you'll talk about balancing, but you won't even get close. And so why I'm so optimistic Bitcoin

is really unfortunate. I'd rather our government deal with the crappy finances so we don't bankrupt our grandkids, because we will. We are bankrupting this country. Mark my freaking words. That's why I've done my whole entire career is watch this stuff. And we don't have the political will to do What do you think about it? The Democrats don't. The Republicans don't. Whoever's going to get elected, mark my words. The very first thing they're saying, we need to rebuild the military. We've got this Chinese threat and the Russian threat and the threat at the border. And so you're going to see military spending go up under both presidents. President Biden or President Harris. All right, what are you going to take the money from? Unless you go after entitlement, which they will not, we're going to have 26 percent spending for the next six years. We've normalized a quantum jump in how big our government is. Republicans say we're for small government. Bullshit. They went from 20% to 26%. That was Donald Trump. He was for big government. The Democrats are for big government. And so we've gone from, we literally have grown the size of the government by 25% in eight years. So what the fuck are people talking about? We're for small government. We literally have just. And so that's why Bitcoin is such a core holding, right? 2012. Doesn't seem so long ago. The average house price in America was $183,000 today. It's over $400. wait a minute, the average house price more than doubled in 12 years. That's insane. And so unless you were holding Bitcoin, like if you hold Bitcoin in 2012 to now, you did pretty well, the house prices

didn't double, right? They shrunk. But if you held dollars, even if you got your zero percent interest and two percent interest and four percent interest, now five percent interest, you're smoked. So young kids, your salaries haven't doubled, right? If you're a entry worker at Macy's or at Goldman Sachs, middle end or high-end jobs, your salaries are up 30%, they're not up 100%. So your chance of buying a house has gone right down the tubes. And so at one point, like our country has to rebalance the budget, get debt to GDP to come down, but we're not going to. And so I think we're going to have a deteriorating, you know, purchasing power of our currency. And that's why hard assets. It's not just Bitcoin. You want

own real estate, you want own stocks, you want own gold, you want on silver. And they're not going to going to straight line, but they're going to head in that direction. I've always said Bitcoin is a report card on financial stewardship, and our financial stewardship on both left and right right now is a D-minus. One other breadcrumb trail we left unfinished here is the Ethereum ETF. So we're talking about how it crossed the finish line with respect to the politics of it. But now let's talk about the narrative. So when you talk to people like Wall Street and traditional finance about Ethereum, like what's your pitch for them? If Bitcoin is digital gold, what do you say about Ether? It used to be, and it's kind of still the pitch. Listen, first I have to explain

them what a blockchain is, right? A blockchain is a giant Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. You know, instead of control by one person, controlled by many, Ethereum wants to be the base layer of trust to build all of this new economy on, this giant spreadsheet that people get to rent and that we all trust. So it's this giant decentralized supercomputer, a process, engine to verify. That's kind of the broad pitch. The reality is, if I was going to put value on Ethereum, that narrative brought in people who care about that community a lot. And they're storing their wealth in that community. And so in lots of things, there's a store of value argument in Ethereum just like there's a Bitcoin. It's a different narrative that brings in

people to trust that community. It's not just we're going to store our wealth and that's all we're going to do. It's we're going to store wealth in this system that one day is going to generate, you know, fees because all the staking rewards, 90% of the value of Ethereum comes from the store of value. Ten percent that comes from the utility. Why the utility is so important is because it gives it narrative. What has surprised me so much, I used to say all the time, how many elements are on the periodic table and people say, well, it's 114. I didn't know that when I first started asking the question, but I googled it. Only gold is value just because it has value. Everything else has utility, right? You don't own copper just to own it. You own it because you think people are going to use it.

So I thought it was going to be Bitcoin here and everything else based on their utility. What I got wrong was people like being part of community. Fucking, there's a no utility to dogecoin, but it's got a $20 billion market cap because people like being part of that community. And they are so skeptical of the debasement of money all over the world that they're okay storing some of their wealth, not all of their wealth, but some of their wealth in Dogecoin or in freaking Cardano, right? Charles Hoskinson, he's constantly trying to work on his narrative. And I remember I used to say, that's a shit coin. I got to say, no one's, I would trash on Cardano and this thing would light up.

Oh, yeah. It's going to after this episode drops, by the way. So prepare. And I would get death threats at times. I mean, but I would at least get spammed and no regrets it's stupid and he doesn't pay attention. And then I realized people have their money in it. They trust their community. It's important to them.

And say, you know, I'm going to leave Cardano alone from now on. And I'm going to say, if that's where you want to store your wealth, go for it. know what you're doing, know who's in your community, like why people care about it. And so what's so interesting is the resilience of so many of these coins. Ripple, right? Brad Garlinghouse is an amazingly competent CEO. They tell a story. They have the ripple, the XRP Army.

I mean, that was another one. I actually owned part of the company. And I said, well, was it so sure? It wasn't even negative on it. And then the XRP Army attacked, you know, we only have 400 employees of Galaxy. See, they had one. You know? And so there's so much identity in our space.

And what I realized is it's a lot stronger than I thought. These ecosystems are resilient. Who knows in 10 years if Cardano still has a billion market cap, or if it's down to 6 billion or 4 billion or zero, or if it's grown, right? I don't think institutions will participate in coins that they don't believe or in ecosystems that they don't believe have something really to add to kind of human industry, right? I don't. I really don't. Because they got to justify themselves to a board or a boss. The Ethereum was going to be the supercomputer or maybe Celestia because it does things faster and it's a modular blockchain or maybe.

But they got to really believe their narrative. There's no valuation metric because once you're in the community, it's how many people want to be in the community. But, you know, memequims are here to stay. My son-in-law was an early on with guy. And I thought, But that's a cute little doggy token. Love Whiff. I thought it was funny. You know, got me a freaking fortune on it. You know, I was paid for his honeymoon with Whiff.

It's amazing. The unexpected often comes true in crypto. And Mike, this has been great. As we start to, like, close this out, I'm curious, you gave some investment advice in different places, like not financial advice, but just like advice for the young investors, some of their 20s or 30s. And one thing you said earlier is you got to know when to buy. And you've got to know when to hold particular assets do and to, like, ride them up

and just let them go. What's your advice for someone listening who's in their 20s and 30s where the year 2024, government debt is ballooning out of proportion. We got this new crypto asset class. Do you have anything general that you would leave folks with? Like if you were giving advice to yourself in this climate and you were in your 20s, what would you say? Yeah. Listen, first, know what you can lose, right? And so you shouldn't put 100% of your money in crypto. The very first thing every young person should do is find a place in a community they think is growing and take an FHA loan. So let the feds guarantee your mortgage and buy a house. You know, like don't buy an expensive house. Buy a house with a mortgage payment you can afford,

but in a place where you think there's growth, because that's the first time you get free leverage. Right. It's non-recourse and you can get leverage. And it teaches you what leverage is, right? I put $10,000 or $25,000 on in a $300,000 house and the house goes to $400,000. I've made $100,000 on a $25,000 bet, less my interest. So I've four-xed my money. You know the household lane went up 30%. Like, oh, all right. Now, leverage can be really dangerous.

I always thought it was the definition of insanity that people were taking, you know, 25 to one leverage on crypto when it was already a 70% of all asset. I was like crack cocaine on top of heroin. And so with the coins they own, you never go break taking some profit. And so you buy something, it goes up triple, sell a third. Take your money back. You know, and so I in general have sold, at one point, I look like a fool. If I told you how much of the theory I owned when it was 15, you'd throw up and you'd be like, oh, my God, no, it was richest guy on the planet.

And, of course, I sold a whole long way. In some ways, I wish I hadn't, but I also bought a jet. And I added tons of utility. I started big charities. And so I don't look back and say, oh, that jet cost me so much. I was like how lucky I was to have stumbled on this token, ridden it up from one to 300, right? Sold a bunch and bought a jet and started a charity.

You know, it's 3,000 now, 3,500. And so my jet is 10x. You know, like, you can't think that way. And so I do think taking profits is important. And then having some core, very few things become Google. Very things will become Bitcoin or Ethereum. Right. And so when you have a new token that goes,

racing up to some FDV that's really high and it's six months old, sell it. Rotate it back into Bitcoin as you're kind of core holding or sell half of it, right? Look at the supply structure coming out. So many of these things with high market caps only are, you know, 20% of the tokens are floated and there's this huge unlock calendar coming, right? So your core positions should be in tokens that are already fully distributed. it. There's going to be sellers and buyers and Bitcoin, but it's distributed, right? Whereas World Coin, for instance, has a monster inflation and a monster lockup schedule. And so when it ran way

up, it was one of the easiest shorts on it. I didn't short it. You know, borrow or whatnot. But I look at it and you're like, oh, it ran up on Sam Altman AI. It got to crazy market cap. And you knew in the next two years, everyone who had it was going to be able to sell it. It's human nature, if you bought something at 100, and it's now a thousand, and Ryan's like, oh, my God, I couldn't buy a house for my wife. Yeah, buy the house. And so in these giant moves, people will sell. And so if they're locked up tokens, they're coming unlocked, they're going to sell them. And so, again, core positions in distributed tokens, trading positions, adventure positions, you've got to take profit along the way. Great advice to end things with. Mike, this has been absolutely

spectacular. I know Galaxy is doing so many things. If he could just like one thing that's top of mind, the most exciting thing that Galaxy is doing right now just to kind of end this episode. Yeah, listen, we have a mine in Texas called Helios that we bought 18 months ago, close to where Bitcoin was on the lows. We needed a place to move all our Bitcoin miners to. And one of the most fascinating things that's happened, and it's a little bit of luck for all of us in this space, is the amount of data center capacity that the hypers, meta, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, who am I missing? Amazon probably.

Needs is breathtaking. It's $350 billion a year of capital. And so we're spending a whole lot of time figuring out what that mine's future is going to be or that data center's future is going to be. I do think there'll be a lot less Bitcoin mining happening in those data centers. and so I think finally hash rate's going to go down. And so ironically, as people are going to pull out their minds and put an AI equipment, Bitcoin mining is to be a better business.

You know, it's a very funny. But it's owning data centers. It's a really privileged position right now. And so that's something at Galaxy I'm most excited about is like unlocking the value there. But we're, you know, we've become a big validator. I think we're the largest validator at the Salonet or the second largest now. So we're building out that business. We're getting on Shane.

really fast. We were very slow to get on chain because of compliance issues and you know, KYCML stuff. And we've now gotten stuff comfortable. And so on Shane lending, on Shane trading. Because I do think in the long run, we need to migrate everything on Shane, right? But the long run's not two years. It's 20. And so you'll see our company morph. And so great energy here, probably the best since I've been here, period. Great young talent coming in. Couldn't be more excited. Really exciting. So we've gone from the herd is coming to the herd is here and now it seems like maybe U.S. politicians are here as part of the herd as well. Mike Novogratz, this has been absolutely fantastic. Thanks so much. Brian, thanks so much. Let's end with this. You know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in.

But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks again.