BTC Sessions - THIS Is Who's Behind The Biggest Bitcoin + MicroStrategy CRASH in 7 Years (Must See)

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

🔥 Bitcoin and MicroStrategy just suffered their biggest crash in 7 years — and the shocking part is who’s behind it. Those in charge of the MSCI Index, Morgan Stanley.This isn’t just about the price drop… It’s about the coordinated moves happening behind the scenes that 99% of people are missing. From massive selloffs to insider manipulation, this may change how you look at Bitcoin and MSTR forever.👉 Join BTC Sessions as we dig into the facts, the charts, and the culprits behind the crash.FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS:https://x.com/PunterJeffhttps://x.com/bevan_waiteFOLLOW BTC SESSIONS on X/Nostr: x.com/[e-mail] private one-on-one sessions with BITCOIN MENTOR! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted.https://bitcoinmentor.io/—------------------------------SHOW SPONSORS:BITCOIN WELL - BUY BITCOINhttps://qrco.de/bfiDC6COINKITE/COLDCARD (5% discount):https://qrco.de/bfiDBVABUNDANT MINES:https://qrco.de/bgYKPBAQUA WALLEThttps://qrco.de/bfiD8gNUNCHUK HONEYBADGER INHERITANCEhttps://qrco.de/bfiDARHODLHODL NO KYC P2P EXCHANGEhttps://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSIONDEBIFI LOANShttps://qrco.de/bfiDCp#btc #bitcoin #crypto

What if one of the biggest price crashes of the last year wasn't organic at all? This week, a sequence of events involving MSCI and Morgan Stanley is raising serious questions because the timing around Bitcoin and strategies October plunge and its January rebound is a little too perfect. Now, I'm not saying it's coordinated, but when you line up the announcement, the silence, the sudden rebound slash pump, and policy reversal, it paints a pattern that's hard to ignore. So today, we're going to walk through what happened, what's confirmed, what's speculation, and most importantly, now that one of the largest players in global finance have quietly positioned themselves to profit from one of Bitcoin's biggest swings in years,

is it over? So today on why are we bullish to discuss this? And much more. We have Jeff Walton from MSTR True North and the hurdle rate pod. We've got Bevan Wait from Jan 3 and of course Will Kassarine, the creator of Domas. If you're not on Noster yet, download that client right away. So lock in, drop a like on the video. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your bullish session. All right.

As I said, I want to welcome to the show, Mr. Jeff Walton, Bevan Wait. And Will Cassarin as I'm adding them to the screen, there we go. Gentlemen, good to see you. How are you guys doing? Fantastic. Happy to be here. Pretty good. Yeah, thanks for having me.

I've got a bull behind me. I'm ready to go. Perfect. Perfect. Well, Jeff, everybody. I don't have a bowl, unfortunately. We got to work on it. No, no, no.

There's a bull off to the right. It's one of my Christmas. special posters and it's me riding a bull. I didn't know that was a requirement going into this podcast. Get with the program. It's 2026. It's happening. Gentlemen, I want to dive right in and I kind of teed up with a bit of a topic here that actually perfectly lines up with the reason one of our guests is mega bullish. And so, Jeff, I'm going to toss it immediately to you.

and rather than explain it myself, I'm going to let you explain what has happened today and maybe kind of what led up to it as far back as October of last year. So what has happened? What has changed? Why do you see it as bullish? Yeah, absolutely. Happy to give an overview here. So a little bit of background. So MSCI is a global index provider. And back in October, the company, MSCI, decided we are going to consider removing companies that have greater than 50% of their assets in digital assets. We're going to consider removing them from index funds. And I think this resulted in some questions on whether or not there was going to be significant sale pressure in the companies that,

the equities that were in the index funds and all of the funds that track this index providers metrics. So one of the things that's interesting about, you know, publicly traded equities is there's a lot of capital from different places, whether it be pension funds or banks or insurance companies that continuously buy index funds passively with capital that's coming in the door. And so when you think about the infrastructure of the equity, market, that passive capital that's coming in the door, as the, they're buying, they're buying equities in the weight that is recommended by the index provider.

So the index provider has actually a significant amount of power to control, like, effectively the design of that index fund. Now, there's some questions on whether or not, like, what's a passive index fund, what's an active index fund, actively managed, you're making decisions frequently, passive, you don't make decisions. It's just a set of criteria. that goes in place. So what MSCI was considering is changing the criteria to fundamentally remove companies

that held digital assets in their treasury. Now, the controversy here is why would you move a company that's holding digital, remove a company that's holding digital assets in their treasury if Bitcoin or any of these other digital assets is just capital, it's just money. Like these are companies that have operated. business is yet they just choose to store the accumulated buddy that they make in their corporate vehicle so that's kind of where this controversy lied and the big question was are they operating businesses are they funds what is a fund what is an operating business and that's

kind of what came up there but the timing which is what you brought up in the intro very curious Right. So the announcement came out after market hours on October 10th. So the market closed. This announcement comes out. And it was actually very quiet. Most of us actually missed the announcement because immediately after that, there was the January, the October 10th flash crash. And Bitcoin dropped like, I don't know, $20,000 in, I don't know, an hour. Our whole, you know, our team was sitting there watching the price just like literally go straight down, which it seemed like there were a few things going on there.

And it's tough to understand whether or not that was the MSCI index, but there was the finance, Athena, collateral problem that was also happening behind the scene. So there was a few things that were happening within the market. But now that we've had a chance to take a step back and watch everything that's happened over the last three months, there's very time, there's very curious timing in all of this. So since that moment on October 10th, when you think about the game theory associated with owning a passively managed index fund, if you have a company like this MSCI that comes out and makes this decision, you have to make a decision on whether or not you think that MSCI is going to go through with removing those companies or not. And you you are everybody that holds these index funds is incentivized to front run that decision making. And you have to take into consideration what, you know, what's the probability this happens?

Like what's the impact on the equity? Do I do I sell out of these equities early before this happens? Or, you know, how does this work? So there was just a really big pause for the last three months like Q4 or 2025. Not only do you have a flash crash. You remove all the liquidity providers. There was a bunch of little small companies that kind of went bankrupt in that whole situation. And then you have this big question mark on four-year cycle and are these companies going to get excluded from the index funds?

You know, what's going on here? And just a lot of chop and downward price action over the last Q4. Now, you know, we get into January 1st and, you know, Bitcoin starts moving the opposite direction. Strategy starts moving the opposite direction. Morgan Stanley comes out and launches a Bitcoin ETF. And the reason that's important is because historically MSCI, this index provider that came out with this on October 10th, was historically owned by Morgan Stanley. They were divested in 2007, but you still venture to think there's a little bit of relationship,

relationship there between the two. So Morgan Stanley comes out with this index fund, and then the next day MSCI comes out and says, we're actually not going to delist the companies that hold digital assets from the index funds moving forward, which is a very bullish indicator. If everybody was trying to front run them getting removed, now if you know that they're not going to get removed, that capital should come back in the door. Now, the one caveat and nuance to this whole thing is that they made one caveat with continuing to keep these companies included. If they issue new shares and raise additional capital and they add more capital to their balance sheet because of the new shares issued, they're not going to

increase the weighting in the index as a result of the new shares that are issued. So you think that that kind of, again, that's a passive index provider making an active decision on an index on a passive index fund and is also an additional ridiculous stance to take when any other company on the planet that's storing their money in any other currency whether it be oil gas or usd whatever they're not subject to those rules those rules within the index fund so they've honed in on just the one if if your treasury is is just in this one particular thing and you issue more shares, we don't, like, there won't be, because effectively what would happen is there would be de facto like forced buying, right? Because people have to allocate according to

waiting, right? Yeah. So the incremental shares that are issued, that doesn't impact the, the market cap waiting within the index fund. So, I mean, it doesn't really change the dynamic here with this as Bitcoin goes up, the underlying market cap of the company, sands the new shares also goes up, which results in new shares potentially having to be purchased from the index fund. And the one thing that I also point out here is MSCI is one index provider. There are many other index providers out there that do not take this and, you know, do not have this rule. And I think there's an incredibly low likelihood that all of the passive index providers would even consider this rule because that goes against passive investing. If the capital is there, then the capital is there.

The market gap is reflective of what the price of the company is at that point in time. So it's, you know, at the end of the day, the companies that hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet in their treasury, they're just storing their money. They're doing the same thing that a person or a family is doing, right? Like you guys store your money in Bitcoin. I store my money in Bitcoin. I could think of my family as a business like I want to survive I want my family to survive I want my family to survive into the future that's the same thing what corporations are doing they want their corporation to survive into the future and what whether that operating business is structured finance like strategy or our company strive or AI or media or whatever that may be these are operating

businesses they just choose to have a treasury management strategy as well so in general I just I wanted to hone in a little bit on on that the timing thing here because this was it was pretty I mean there's no like direct smoking gun but like there's smoke in the room and I heard a bullet so like really I mean it was it was the announcement the dump or the the the proposes proposed the proposal, the dump, like immediately thereafter, three months of pretty, like, excruciating, like, crab walking, smacking back between, you know, 80s and, like, maybe max 90 before getting smacked down again. And then all of a sudden we start to see a positive turnaround at the beginning of the year

days before. Or they're like, hey, Morgan Stanley, Bitcoin, ETF, also that rule that we're proposing. Yeah, that's not, we're not going to do that. I mean, in the realm of like effing around, where would you place this on a scale of 1 to 10, like likelihood? I think that the other thing that was really interesting, I mean, strategies price got totally slammed and hammered. And it was very clear that there were sentiment attacks happening in social media. Yeah. Like coordinated attacks in social media from bot accounts from nowhere.

I'm glad that they put that new thing in. So you could click and see like where these accounts are, where the accounts are from. But there were coordinated attacks not only from like bought accounts, but from like JPMorgan came out with an article like on a specific day where like, Jim Channos and JPMorgan are posting on the same day, the same exact thread. And then Walter Bloomberg that account comes out with MSCI is going to delist these companies from the index funds, even though that news is from like a month prior, but it all happened on the same time. It was just so strange how it all happened at the same time. It's tough to take a stance on this, but the incentives are not aligned with being along here. The incentives were not aligned between the institutions who would potentially want to position and allocate,

knowing what they knew was on the horizon, like potentially having an ETF launching, rolling into 2026, tax loss harvesting, managing their fleet of salespeople, having opportunities and getting aligned, getting ready for 2026. the incentives were definitely not a lot. Seeing what you see now with like the, you know, what happened today, do you think that we've kind of, for the time being, seen if this was somebody jerking everybody around to position themselves properly, do you think for the time being we've seen the end of that?

Or do you think that like we're still in the midst of it? I personally think the bottom is in for 2026. Just understanding corporately now that MSCI has taken that stance, understanding like the leverage profile of strategies balance sheet, like the company is more healthy than ever. They've got two and a half years of dividend reserve that they can potentially use if they ever needed to. Digital credit is taking off like a wildfire.

People say there's no demand for it, but they launched $8 billion of this stuff last year in the very first year of ever, you know, inception of these products, right? I think that the plumbing of the market has fundamentally changed. I think four-year cycle is over forever. And I think we'll, you know, see the change in the business cycle here. We're talking about QE. We're coming into an election year in the U.S.

Capital markets are bubbling. IPOs are happening. M&A is happening across the board everywhere. I think we'll see a lot happen here in 2026. That's my speculation. Well, the most Bitcoin thing ever is the four-year cycle coming to an end with a supposed bull year down 5%. But the next most bullish Bitcoin thing ever would be a supposed barrier being green.

So I guess we'll see how that pans out. but I want to hear from Will and Bevin on the topic at hand, you know, backroom deals, shady people doing shady things, and positioning themselves so they can get some of those sweet sats at the same time or fees off of them. And the antidote of, I mean, it didn't affect me. I had my sats in cold storage. I felt pretty good about it.

So, I mean, I'll go to Bevin first. someone get some thoughts from will here. Bevan, how do you feel about, you know, Morgan Stanley doing Morgan Stanley-ish things? Oh, you're muted, bud. I'm back.

Well, first of all, I think it's like the most bullish thing ever. The fact that like large institutions want to manipulate the price to push it down so that they can enter the market is like massive. I mean, Morgan Stanley. We're talking about Morgan Stanley here. Like if Morgan Stanley is trying to enter the Bitcoin, network by pushing the price down. That is so insanely bullish. I don't even know how to quantify how bullish that is. Also, I just have to say I'm standing up for Samson here. He's

been shouting like market manipulation for like a year and people have given him a lot of shit. And, you know, here we are. So I mean, I maybe a question for you, Jeff, is like where you kind of said this before, Ben, but like where do you see this going? If we're just talking about a couple large institutions right now, what are the ripple effects of this coming out? Like how are the other large and maybe even larger institutions going to see this? Do you think that they're going to try to do a similar thing? Or are we just going to see a massive rip up in price in 2026 sometime when everyone kind of realizes that these institutions have been positioning themselves over the last year?

Yeah. I think at this point you can't ignore. what's happened in 2025. So the ETFs, since the ETFs were launched, they've been the most successful ETFs in history. They reached $100 billion faster than any ETF ever in history, like years before gold hit $100 billion in AUM. So and in 2025, the Ibit, BlackRock ETF was the most profitable ETF for their company. You know it's really easy to sell your most your most profitable ETF that like the incentives are aligned like go sell the crap out of this thing and i'm sure i mean vanguard we saw at the end of 2025 also flipped the script they went from hey we're not

we're not doing any of these bitcoin exposure you can't get any of this on the vanguard platform and then they changed their mind why because they saw the fee opportunity they can go make a ton of money doing this and they completely dropped the ball on missing the most you know exciting ETF of all time And they could have been in the door there, but they chose not to. They took a political stance. And now you see a company like Morgan Stanley launched something like this. I wouldn't be surprised if we see all of those advisors that have, you know, Morgan Stanley private wealthies. That creeps in one to four or five percent of these large wealthy people's portfolios or company portfolios because they have the product to offer and they're able to monetize recommending that product.

So again, the incentives are aligned for these large institutions. And the one thing we saw at the end of Q4, too, was also banks kind of change their tune. I mean, you've seen Jamie Diamond now publicly say, like, crypto's here. It's not dead. Like, we're going to do this stuff. Again, incentives are aligned there. You think about these large banking institutions, and they want to bring this capital in the door. They want to hold the Bitcoin so they can start to leverage against.

it. Right now, the banking framework as it is, if they held any Bitcoin capital, it doesn't work towards Basel banking standards, so they can't leverage against it on their own balance sheet. But you can start to conceptualize a world here where, you know, if JP Morgan held Bitcoin on behalf of some of these large institutional clients like strategy, they can go get a letter of credit against the Bitcoin, right? You can start to do these other things within the traditional financial ecosystem by onboarding those traditional banking infrastructure to, you know, operate in that market. So I personally don't think we're going to see like a get dragged in the mud situation. Again, mate, like it could be wrong, but, you know, we've seen a lot of OG whales sell out.

We've got corporations that are continuing to buy this stuff in perpetuity. We know, I think just in the last seven days, the Bitcoin ETFs have purchased like 10,000 Bitcoin strategy. They're raising capital daily. The digital, like the stretch instrument is hitting $100. I estimate they raised anywhere between $25 and $30 million today on stretch to go buy Bitcoin. And you've got companies like ours that are looking to do the exact same thing. So I'm bold up here for those reasons. The institutions are here.

I know some OG people don't like the, the, suit coiners, but I mean, the incentives are aligned and things, things look good here. Yeah, I think they're like the most important thing to note since 2024 is just the structural change in the demand in this industry. It's like since the ETFs came out, there's been, you know, we had the big run up in 2024 and then 2025 was kind of this weird sideways up and down price action. But it's like it's not retail driven mania anymore. It is like deep institutional. demand. And of course, nation states may be soon after. Will, I want to give you the opportunity. If you have any thoughts or questions for Jeff or anything

on the topic at hand. I mean, my opinion on these topics has been the same since 2013-ish, which is I'm basically checked out until we hit, I mean, what is gold? Gold is like 31 trillion market cap. And Bitcoin's a better technology than gold. You take 31 trillion divided by probably the supply that's available, I don't know, 15 million Bitcoin, maybe less. And then it's like, what is that? $2 million per coin? Like, wake me up when we get there because everything else is just noise until then. So that's my opinion. Fair enough. Fair enough. Awesome. Well, Jeff, any final thoughts that you want to tag on to the topic before we do a rotation here? Yeah, it's really, it's really

I'm incredibly interested and bullish about not only the corporate infrastructure, but also the structured finance that's happening here as well, like these new securitized instruments that are taking, you know, this volatile Bitcoin exposure and tranching it into a low volatility, high yield instrument. And I think that's going to take off like a wildfire. There are that historically, there was nothing for, you know, any of the bond market to be able to purchase Bitcoin. Like the bond market is never going to purchase Bitcoin. It just doesn't fit in the mandate. It doesn't fit in the liquidity profile like it just it doesn't fit anything so these new instruments provides a new siphon for this new pool of capital that's historically never been touched to get this you know

powered yield with with liquidity that's a it's a greater instrument with a different risk profile in my opinion a much better risk profile than everything else in the entire bond market so So I think what we will see in 2026 and 2027 is rating agencies starting to look at these things a little bit more and the market beginning to understand the risk profile of these instruments as they mature. So many, just like we saw at Vanguard, so many asset allocators will not touch something until it's been out for a year, two years or three years. They just they can't do it. They've got protocols in place where they can't do it. And we'll see the same thing happened with these digital credit instruments, is that they will mature. They'll be out for a year and two years and the amount of capital will come in the door slowly.

And then it'll start to elevate. And that market's huge. I think it's, you know, 300 trillion-ish. I don't know, 100 to 300 trillion-ish. Damn. All right. Well, I mean, let's hope for a bullish 2026 then. I feel like this past year has been challenging for a lot of Bitcoiners that were thinking like

it was going to be the four-year cycle all over again and that's clearly out the window. But for me, I mean, even the most bullish thing in my mind would be like, you know, modest new all-time highs in a supposed barrier followed by some more modest new all-time highs in what people would think would be the next year had to be bearish. I would just like to see a slow grind because, again, it gets rid of the tourists. And then Bitcoin does Bitcoin things. Whatever the opposite of what people are expecting is always good by me. I have a quick question for Jeff, if you don't mind.

Jeff, what do you think the biggest hurdle is to having larger adoption of these instruments? you know, these bond instruments that are being created through micro strategy and then a bunch of other of the corporate entities that are, you know, treasury companies now. What do you see as like the biggest sticky point to more capital coming into those? I'd say historically, at the very beginning when these things inceptive like in February last year, even the middle of last year, it was how are you going to pay the dividends? They couldn't conceptualize this new model of having a stalwart balance sheet and issuing a, you know, 10% of your balance sheet and credit and being able to utilize your balance sheet to raise additional capital to pay the dividends or, you know,

sell Bitcoin if you need to or have operations to do that. There was because the company's operating cash flow is relatively small and yet the preferred instrument liability or the obligation is relatively large, there was concern with that. But the novelty and the, um, The really invention here is they've got the balance sheet. They can sell Bitcoin whenever they want. Bitcoin trades $60 billion a day. Like if they need to go sell $100 million a dollar Bitcoin, you could do it in two hours. You go pay the dividend, like if you need to.

So just that optionality is always there. And really it's the rating agencies wrapping their heads around this stuff and being able to conceptualize like what is like how do I? How do I get my head around the risk profile this thing? What is the risk profile? You need to understand Bitcoin. You need to understand network effects. You need to understand the security.

You need to understand like you need to underwrite Bitcoin, which is a bit difficult. And one thing that's really interesting is like strategy. They were they were given an issue or credit rating of B minus last year by the S&P. It's like one of the lowest ratings you can get. So if they were to get a rating on any of the instruments, it would be like a notch or two below the B minus. They gave zero credit for the capital that they held on the balance sheet for the Bitcoin. Zero. So they got a B minus rating with zero credit for the $60 billion of Bitcoin that they held on the balance sheet.

That's crazy. If you give them 10% credit for the $60 billion of Bitcoin that they've got in the balance sheet, all of a sudden the rating goes from B minus to A minus. Right. It just changes drastically if you give them any credit. And then you've really got to break the entire credit rating system because now you have like let's just say a B plus issuer. You've got a B plus issuer with 11% yielding instruments in the market. What does that say about all the other high yield B minus debt that's paying eight,

nine, 10%? That breaks the whole model. That breaks trillions of dollars of your rating agency model. That's a big deal. I'm sure there's some hesitancy to like, you know, truly rate this thing based on the risk profile. And that the second and third order effects are massive. And I think the people that are making the decisions understand that the downstream impact here is, is really big from like one decision. Do you think that the people that are making these decisions like do or don't understand Bitcoin? Yeah.

There's several rating agencies. I think they're, I think they're certainly behind. you think about like who works at a rating agency it's like anybody who's not worth their salt to go work at a finance company right these are like not not impressive people for the most part so they're generally behind they're generally conservative like the the decisions that they make impact the what goes into pension funds and insurance companies and banks and like really conservative capital that people don't want to lose so the i think they're behind but there will be There will be one rating agency or two that we'll figure this out and they'll lead.

And all of the markets are all of the Bitcoin companies are going to go there. They're going to go get ratings and then it's going to infiltrate the market. And we'll see how it plays out. Very interesting. It's fascinating. Yeah, totally. Well, I mean, again, we'll have to. The year is young.

We're a week in and it's already interesting as hell. So now we are going to, we're going to go to a quick break. When we come back, we're going to be going to Will here. And, well, I know you've got a specific reason for being bullish, but I also wanted to integrate a little bit of a question on your thoughts on another current event that happened today. That maybe actually might segue into your topic pretty well. But those watching may have already heard or heard earlier today that run, the online, effectively like the antidote to supposed an antidote to YouTube censorship,

has now integrated a Bitcoin wallet natively to all of their users. I believe in an article, I think I saw something to the tune of like 68 million users, something like that. And so they've integrated on-chain Bitcoin, tether, I think tether gold, something like that. So you can tip people do all kinds of stuff. I'm going to get Will's thoughts on this afterwards, given that you are deep in the Noster ecosystem. And we will hear from him in just a moment. If you're enjoying the conversation, if you're new here, make sure you subscribe so you can come back every week and see what we're up to.

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And every machine is insured at full replacement value. Everything is hosted in the U.S., powered by hydro, and mining equipment may qualify for 100% Your One bonus depreciation. Learn more at Abundantmines.com slash sessions. Right. We are back in, and Will, I wanted to tee you up with a little article here. I'll put us over on the other side, actually. Yeah, so Rumble, they launched a quote-unquote crypto wallet on their platform. I mean, I've been taken off of YouTube a time or two in my day.

A number of YouTube content creators have. And so, especially during lockdowns and stuff like that, if you had anything less than glowing to say about the current state of things, you were likely de-platformed. platformed in some way, shape, or form. And so a lot of those people found their way over to Rumble as that was happening. And yeah, so they have now launched this wallet. As I said, it has, it looks like it's, I played around with it a little bit. It has Bitcoin. Also has tether. So I understand that, you know, some of the more timid people that haven't used Bitcoin,

may want something somewhat familiar. It also has tether gold. And then Chris Pavlovsky from Rumble had this to say, if it is not clear, I'll make it really clear. Rumble wallet will compete directly against Coinbase and Venmo, but we're not custodial and we cannot shut down your account. It's true financial freedom to buy hold and tip crypto built and backed by Tether and Rumble. So I'm not going to put any of my thoughts in there, I would love to hear your thoughts, Will. So what do you think about this? And then I'll allow you at your free will to segue into why you were bullish as well. Well, I mean, it's nice that they didn't just immediately do a shit coin. So that's already a positive thing. So the fact they decided to add Bitcoin and make it non-custodial are all really

good things. I guess the tether thing is like whatever. I guess people like tether. I'm not really not really into Tether, but apparently there are a lot of users of Tether and stable coins. So maybe that makes sense for those users. I think the number one complaint from a lot of the Noster people is the fact there's no lightning integration. But, you know, maybe eventually they'll look into that and think about integrating it. Because especially if you have that many users, they say, what, 68 million users and you're all going to be doing on-chain tipping. I mean, maybe we'll start using the base chain again. I think the biggest complaint of last year is that it's full of spam and no one's using it for monetary activity.

Which I think, so I actually think on-chain, you know, tipping and stuff is okay if we can start using the base chain again for actual monetary transactions. My only concern is like when you start using, when you start tying social identity to an on-chain wallet, there can get a lot of privacy leaks, especially with Bitcoin. So I would like to see silent payments if they eventually want to look into that. I don't know how like hardcore they're going to get, especially since silent payments is pretty new and up and coming. So yeah, I think it's overall a positive thing. If we get a lot more people with non-custodial Bitcoin wallet, it's like kind of hard to complain. about that can't be a bad thing right yeah i'd echo your your sentiment on a lot of things uh non-custodial that's that's a huge win they could have come out the gate and said hey here's our custodial bitcoin

wallet it'll sit in our rumble uh account um and maybe you can withdraw at your leisure but uh non-custodial by default is is solid um i was pretty surprised that in 2020 for a like a tipping functional wallet that it was on chain. And I think when I was playing it with it, if I'm not mistaken, it was a singular Bitcoin address. That's rough. That's not good in terms of privacy. Anybody can look at that one address and be like...

I mean, that's like, that's a mistake of era 2014. I'm like, I'm sure people have like hopefully learned that single, single addresses are not a good thing, but I guess it's still a lesson we still need to learn in 26. Yeah, that could have changed since I played with it. That was like pre-launch. I got a little key in it like, I want to say a month back, maybe a month and a half. So that could have changed. I hope it changed because, yeah, privacy-wise, you don't want just one address where all your tips are going to. That's not good best practices. My one worry with the on-chain is that people are going to send like 25 cent tips and UTXO will be dust.

And we won't understand why that is. So hopefully that's not the case, but that will likely be the case if it's all on chain. So we're going to have to do some education or just implement lightning. But it is interesting that like they never even reached out to Nostar people at all because I feel like we have a pretty good protocol for tipping in an open source way. like that records it. There's still time.

I don't know. I guess they're not doing lightning. So I mean, Nostor's apps are all lightning. Yeah. Yeah. Until we're something we're going to talk about, baby. We'll see. Yeah.

Yeah. I want, I mean, I feel like this plays into, as you're saying, like Noster, lightning native, tipping, all this kind of stuff. So I mean, in that realm, I guess we can just segue right there. Why are you so bullish? What are you excited about? Yeah. I guess it's been like three years or so since, you know, all the clients started taking off on Noster.

There was definitely like a hype curve. It's definitely died down a bit. But we still have a roughly active. We have a very active core users of around 10,000 users. And, you know, I think we really showed that, you know, I think before we launched Zaps, the Lightning Network had very, very little usage. I think on my note, I maybe had like one or two Lightning transactions per month. But now ever since we launched Zaps on Noster, I think I have over like four. 400,000 transactions on my node just from Zabs, which is pretty crazy. And over like a Bitcoin and revenue and stuff. So I think it really proved that the minute you attach lightning to a social network and you build a protocol around it, then, you know, everyone can then build a client and everyone can start using this thing.

And then there's like the network effects of all of the apps working together creates this explosion of usage. So it's really weird to me that they wouldn't even like consider that because and just help grow that network. But yeah, so in terms of like what we're, while we're bullish now, it's like now that we have all these established clients, it's about what are we doing? Like what's next? So I think the first wave of Nostra clients were all about like, hey, let's just build Twitter

clones. But I think this last year and this year specifically, we're really starting to see all the other stuff you can build on it. People are building like voice chat applications. There's one called air chat where you can kind of talk into it and it transcribes it. There's all these cool new apps that are coming along. And one thing on the DOMA side of things is I, I mean, we're starting to build like business use cases. Like what does your productivity suite look like on Noster and it all integrates nicely into Bitcoin.

So I'm really bullish on that aspect. Just grow the use cases. And if we can grow, get more people onto the network with all these new use cases, we'll get a whole bunch of new Bitcoin users as well. Hopefully. Because like I've always seen Nostr as a way to kind of purple or orange pill people. So I always say the purple pill makes the orange pill go down smoother. And like even in the early days of Nostr, we, we saw, you know, we had Ethereum. people joining. They're like, whoa, I didn't know Bitcoin was so fast. I thought it took

like forever to do a transaction. Like they didn't even like, because we just, you're able to like show the power of the of lightning and instant transactions. So I, and maybe that's one of my concerns with the Rumble wallet as well is hopefully they don't see these like 10 minute transaction, like 10 minute tips and they're like, okay, well, Bitcoin's a slow ancient technology and my privacy is horrible. Yeah. So yeah, but in terms of the future, like what am I think, what are we thinking about next? Like how does Zapps evolve from here? Honestly, on chain zabs, why not, right? I mean, because I did, you know, during that whole debate with the spam last year,

and oh my God, it was so annoying. People just like, I feel like that's all Twitter was for like six months. I'm sure it's still ongoing. Yeah. About all the fork and stuff. But, you know, one of the biggest things was that there's people aren't using on chain enough, which is contrasting to the 2021 or something where when Lightning took off and the fees were spiking and people are saying, people are using Bitcoin too much.

We need to stop using Bitcoin as much. And now it's the opposite. So I don't know. People, I don't know what's going on there. But now I was like, hey, what if we just, what if we encourage more on chain usage again to kind of get, to kind of price out a lot of the spammers? I feel like I've always felt like that's kind of the most obvious way to get rid of spam is just like price them out. So maybe like having some type of onchains app would would be a cool way to do that. So that's something I'm thinking about using silent payments.

And also switching to Bolt 12. I mean, I don't know how technical or how familiar people are, but both 12. I mean, we can, I'd say what a good way to frame it is, again, for the, for the, because we're going to have a good mix of people. There's going to be some hardcore bit corners in the audience. There's going to be some people that are more coming from the traditional finance realm as well. And they're coming in and they're like, what the hell is an roster? And so we've got a wide range here.

So like, you know, just to kind of break. it down. Let's do a quick 101 of like just a few basic things. And we don't need to like, you know, dwell on them too much. But regular Bitcoin versus Lightning, Noster and the feature set that makes it so special. And then we can go from there. Sure. I mean, yeah. So, you know, lightning has this amazing technology. Lightning, so there's a lot of confusion around lightning. People think Lightning is some other protocol. It's like, no, lightning is Bitcoin. All lightning is, it's just off-chain Bitcoin transactions. So you create a transaction and you don't broadcast it yet. And then you can have it

between two people. So like, let's say I open a channel, which kind of think of like a bar tab, like open a bar tab with my friend. And then, you know, I say, hey, I'm going to send you this many sets. You're going to send me this many sets. And when I want to buy something from them, I just, I just move that balance toward them. And if they want to buy something for me, that that moves the balance towards me, we don't ever touch the on chain. It's still a real valid Bitcoin transaction. So this is the lightning network and and the way that it works. is that you take all those bar tabs and you link them together with computers and then that allows you to route payments through machines. So it's a really cool system. And the reason you'd want to do

this is that, you know, creating an on-chain transaction is can be very expensive. The fees can be very high and it can be very slowly to wait 10 minutes for the transaction to confirm. But updating these transaction on lightning is instant. So we really like lightning for tipping because it's just, it's really satisfying when you send someone money and it's like confirms within one millisecond or whatever it is, 100 milliseconds. So, So we've been using it. I think Jack just launched lightning payments on all of his square terminal. So that's we're we're starting to get Bitcoin lightning out to like the majority of the

world for buying physical things in the real world. So you know, lightning is a great technology for instant payments. Whereas on-chain is probably better for things like if you want to buy a house or buy a car or buy like you you don't mind waiting 10 minutes to make sure you get you have that confirmation on chain and then your node tells you that the funds actually moved. Yeah. sending leftovers from your paycheck for long-term savings into a cold wallet, something like that. Yeah. And kind of like where you store all your savings and you make sure they're in there's secure.

And another good property about on-chain Bitcoin is that it's, I want to say on-chain Bitcoin. Well, on-shine Bitcoin is Bitcoin. But the good properties, it has some better properties over Lightning in the sense that it's a lot easier to custody, you know, generating a wallet. This is probably why Rumble chose on-chain because it's actually just a lot simpler. Lightning's pretty complicated. So, yeah, that's one of the big benefits of on-chain Bitcoin is that it's, It's just really simple and you don't really need to run a node. Yeah, yeah, that's fair.

Okay. What's like the best lightning app? And can the lightning wallets work together with each other? One thing I've been frustrated with is like I've played with a few of these things, like lightning and liquid and I'm like, and they couldn't communicate with each other. And there wasn't a great guide of like how this stuff worked together. And like how?

Okay, yeah, jump and I'm like, I need to know more about this. Well, first of all, obviously, like, I think Aqua is amazing for Lightning and Liquid integration, because you can use both, right? Like the Aqua Wallet basically utilizes Liquid to be able to talk to all these different things. So you can store your, you know, your wallet funds on the Liquid Network and then you can send Lightning Payments. You can swap to on-chain Bitcoin. You can use on-chain Bitcoin any way you want. And then you can also have, like, private transactions through the Liquid Network. So, you know, selfishly, like I work for the company.

that's developing this wallet, you know, I think it's one of the best solutions. But there are other, you know, wallets out there that are great alternatives as well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, shout out to, in a similar vein of what Aqua is doing, Bull Bitcoin is exuding kind of the similar model of using liquid, but executing these swaps with lightning. And to the end user, you know, this was one of the things about Aqua that excited me when it first came out, was it obfuscated the complicated bits of the background. So you have a balance and it just says like, here's your spending wallet.

And lightning or liquid or whatever, it just handles it. Like you scan a QR code to send to somebody. And it just says, oh, it looks like you're doing this. And it just figures it out. And you just hit send.

When you're receiving, it's kind of like a merchant receiving. You're kind of like, well, how do you want to pay me? And do you want to pay me like? or liquid or whatever. And then you just hit that button.

But it keeps it as a singular balance. And there's, I think it started a trend with Aqua of a lot of wallets being like, hey, can we bake together these things, but not make the end user have to think about what they're doing. Can they just use it? And there's, you know, there's a lot of different flavors of stuff out there. But it's getting a lot better to the point where you. don't have to think as an end user too much about how you're interacting with things,

it'll just kind of do it for you. So we're there. We're like closer or? I think we're like, we're kind of there. Yeah, I think it's working already, but like it's not widespread. And obviously, like, we want Aqua adoption and just Bitcoin adoption in general to kind of spread from this. But I think it makes it really easy to use.

And I actually remember the first time I used Aqua, I was so confused way before I worked for Jan 3. I was like, why is liquid, why is my L2 Bitcoin like liquid and then how do I send a lightning payment? But again, yeah, what Ben just said, like it kind of abstracts it. Because, you know, end users, like not everyone's going to, for one, like run a Bitcoin node. And for two, run a lightning node. And it gets really complicated. You can get super nerdy and into this stuff and figure it. out. It's not that hard to figure it out. I think anyone could probably do it, especially with

the help of, you know, AI now. But not everyone's going to want to. So I think the fact that it can just be abstracted away makes it more possible for more people to use it. I want a T to Will here because there's first Will, I want your thoughts on kind of like where we're at with this end user simplicity when it comes to lightning. But secondly selfishly I also want to know when aqua lightning address is that thing that can be possible and because then that could be become somebody's like end wallet for something like Nostr as well so anyways well I'll throw it to you first um was that question toward me what when aqua No, no, no, no, no. My question for you was, where do you think we're at, as Jeff had asked, in regards to end user experience with lightning and stuff like that? Is it compared to Jeff's previous experience better? Are we getting there? Are we there? Like, where are we at?

So yeah, because I quit my job to like work on lightning and that's what I was doing for like until I worked on Domus. I was working on the core lightning and I love running lightning nodes. It's super fun. And I feel really sad that I stop working on lighting to switch over to Nostra because I go back and I'm like, I felt like nothing has really changed too much in terms of number of lightning wallets out are really good. Like you know, all the best ones are custodial. You know, Wall of Satoshi is really good. I mean, most of them are custodial just because it's easier. But I was hoping to see like 100 instead of like just five.

But I think we need more lending wallets. And like, so I, yeah, so more more lightning wallets and more reliable lending wallets. We're actually building one into Damos, which is going to be cool with the help of Spiral. So that's going to be cool. Not going to shit on you for that. I don't know. They always shit on me. I just, I just ram it through review regardless.

And that's like, I don't know. But we do have an Android client as well. So that's going to be we can at least launch it there without fighting too much against Google. And I think we're starting to see a new style of accepting Bitcoin payments. So those two new technologies are both wild and silent payments are going to make receiving Bitcoin so much easier. You don't need to have like this complicated like lightning address that requires a server. You literally just have like this one small string that's like your universal identifier for like, hey, you can send money to this string. And it's and it doesn't require

web server. It's just like built into your wallet. So I'm really, I think, the way that people are going to be using Bitcoin in like a year or two is going to be completely different than the way people use Bitcoin now. And it's going to be a lot simpler. So I'm really bullish on the Ux improvements that are coming to that. But yeah, we're still working on the details of that. Fair. So I had this gentleman that he works for this company called Bitcoin Africa.

And he was explaining to me that in Africa, they figured out how to do this somehow, but they're able to send, I guess, lightning Bitcoin. over cellular in a text message. I just, I was like, whoa, that kind of sent me to another level. But it would love like, what does that mean? Like how does that integrate? Like what does this all come together? I guess what I'm getting at is I don't want to download 100 apps on my phone and have like,

you know, all of this money in just different places and different apps. Like is it, is it all going to flow? to one spot. Can I have one spot where I just trust the party that I work with, maybe it's Aqua or whatever it may be. And like I can interact and interface with everything. The lighting network is that interoperability layer in some sense. So as long as it's a real lightning wallet, you should be able to send your money instantly

from any one of those lightning wallets to any other lighting wallet. So when you finally decide that, hey, I'm I finally trust this lightning wallet, it should be easy just to click a button, send it to the other one. And yeah, so that's the great thing about lighting is that it's super interoperable. And the thing about, you know, people in Africa needing to send Bitcoin over, like, radio waves or, you know, cellular networks, it's mostly because that Wi-Fi, like, penetration is not that great in Africa. And so it's like they're building a solution that eventually will be solved by having better Wi-Fi and having better internet connection. But right now it's like, you know, serving a purpose. Yeah, I was I was there for a

month and I just realized how bad the cell networks are. You might get lucky and get 3G and then that's where they switch over to those like very interesting protocols, which you're referring to, which allows you to interact with like a screen and a menu and like check your balance. But it's over a very, very low bandwidth link. But it is cool. That's the, that's the nature of when you have programmable money, you can build these really cool interfaces on top of the network and have lots of novel ways of interacting with the network. So yeah, it's just, it's really cool that that's even a possibility. It's, it's Jeff, to your point about the cell phone network. I just got back from actually, so did, so did Will, but just got back

from Africa. We went to the African Bitcoin conference. And one of the things down there is called Matchankara. And it's basically, yeah, Bitcoin via Texas. message because a lot of people don't have like smartphones or they'll just have like a regular feature phone. And so these are the different countries that you can basically use regular text messages to send Bitcoin. Like it's, it's wild. And so like the amount of innovation that's happening in some of these areas where it's

just like, you know, a problem that the average person in the West would not consider like, what if I can't use the internet? while you know you still can use bitcoin and and further to this there's other technologies like e-cash systems which give greater privacy but also allow allow for offline transactions entirely and you can still still use bitcoin and then when you eventually do get signal it's like a you do like a redemption type thing but it's still like effectively you're able to transact nonetheless. So there's there's a lot going on and all of these like e-cash systems and lightning and liquid and all of these different things are, you know, they're different. But

lightning is kind of the glue that's holding all these things together and allowing them to communicate. So, you know, I've done videos where I've taken a wallet that's natively liquid, a wallet that's natively lightning, an e-cash wallet, an on-chain wallet, and I was able to just send from each one to each one seamlessly without any interruption with no worry whatsoever. And it just worked. So we're getting there. We're getting to the point where the end user doesn't have to be like,

oh, my wallet doesn't work with yours. It, yeah. Okay, okay, cool. Good to know. Maybe I'll jump back in. Will. I'm trying to orange pill my chiropractor and I'm like I gotta wait until like you know I could just tell him like hey just download this and I'm trying to imagine Jeff sat there like this you're like yeah you totally get a little wallet and yeah yeah we just raised $200 million and he's like exactly exactly um will I do want to go back to you really quick I don't know if we even got into it yet but the I want to

hear about something that you're excited about in regards to ZAPs. So can you give for the non-Noster initiated, what are ZAPs as they relate to Noster and what's new on the horizon? Okay, yeah, for sure. So ZAPS solved a very specific problem that I had when we're building DOMIS, which were, you know, we, so we put the ZAP button on a post, which is, so a ZAP button is instead of liking a post, like on Twitter, it would actually send lightning Bitcoin like instantly. But the only issue was you could never see the amount of like on Twitter. When you click a like, you can see the total number of likes, but there was no way to see the total number of Zaps or the total number of SATs send at the post because that's not

a part of the Lightning Network. It's not like it's going to magically appear somewhere. And we don't have a centralized place to put that information. It's a decentralized network. So the idea is, okay, if your Lightning Network, If the node receives a payment of a specific format, then it can then send a receipt to the Noster Network. And a receipt is just a Nostronote, just like any other Nostr note. And so that other clients, so like Amethys, Primal, Domus,

they can pull down those receipts and then tally them on a post, and then you can see how many Zaps are. So we basically protocolize this idea of like, we protocolized the receipts of a lightning payment and made it like an open protocol so that any app can integrate it. So that's the original inception of Zaps, and it's been very successful

and it's been implemented into hundreds of Nostra clients. But yeah, I mean, the next, the next, so that we're just thinking about what we're going to do next and kind of improving and adding more different types of Zaps, so on-chain zaps, bolt 12 zaps. There's kind of like what we're heading toward, but it's been, it's been a wild ride. The silent payment thing, maybe just really quick in the realm of on-chain Bitcoin payments. We were talking just before about the Rumble Wallet. It's like, okay, well, when I played with it, it was a singular on-chain address.

Not great for privacy. Like, you know, that can have implications if somebody sees that Bitcoin address, they donate to it. They can also query the address and see every donation that goes to it. And so what does silent payments do in this regard? Yeah, so, you know, we want that. We want to be able to do that. We want to be able to put an on-chain address into your profile and not let completely docks your privacy. So silent payment solves this problem.

It's allowing us to put a piece of information on your social profile and then the people can, basically how it works is using that special key, you can then generate a private address to send to. So there's no trace of it online. And that silent payment, that silent address is based off of another piece of data from your wallet. So the combination of that piece of data and your piece of data from your wallet, it creates a very specific address that only you. You two know, so it uses something called if you helmet magic. But only those, the two parties involved, no.

So then you can receive money from anyone and it can be completely private and there's no trace of it on chain. So these are all really good properties that you would want if you wanted to have on chain tipping on a network. But the thing that I keep thinking about is like it still has that original issue that we had with Zapps to begin with, which is like there's no trace of it. Obviously it's good that there's no trace of it. But it would still be cool to see like a tally of like, oh, this post gain like five Bitcoin.

We don't have to dox the person who actually tipped it. We can actually just add a total to it. But there's no reason why we couldn't do something like an on-chain zap using silent payments, which is something I really want to do because I think it would be cool. And it would be really badass to see someone just tip like a Bitcoin on a post. I think that would be like a record moment in Bitcoin. So I want to see that happen.

Yeah, that would be pretty incredible. I will say that I know before people like in the early days of lightning, people had issues like sending slightly larger payments and stuff like that. You know, for the company I do invoices and now I regularly see like multi-thousand-dollar lightning payments like flying around like nobody's business. And it's no real issue to me. I think the other day there was like a $7,000 payment that like was going through. And I was like, oh, they sent lightning.

Holy shit. The largest, the largest app we've seen on the network is 20 million sat. So 0.2 Bitcoin, which is probably around like 20,000. thousand dollars or something. Yeah, or 20 grand on the lightnings app. So I mean, it's not, I guess it's not just for little tips then. Yeah. It's just rare, but, you know, it, it, sometimes you do have liquidity issues if you don't have the, the capacity between two lightning channels. So it would, with with on-chain Bitcoin, you have to worry about that. So, you know. Yes, exactly. Well, that's awesome. Will, if, uh, if people want to dive into a little bit more

on Noster, on Domas, on anything, uh, where can they check it out? Yeah, I mean, just download a Nostra client. Usually you can, you know, start to see people posting. And so, like, you can download Domit, you can download Domit, you can download Amethyst, no steward. There's like, there's so many you can choose from these days. And they create an account. And then, yeah, follow me. I'm JB55 at jb55.com.

Yeah, we have, we have, we have Nostra addresses these days. We don't actually just sale our large N-Pub. You know, I could, I could try to, but it would probably too annoying. Well, I have to tell you this hilarious last little thing before we do a little segue here. But Gary, who is now part of the show, he does a show once a week with my Thursday co-host, Nathan. They do one called Mentor Session, and they interview different people in and around the Bitcoin space, but, you know, non-Bitcoin people that are diving into Bitcoin. Anyways, he goes on Robert Breedlove's podcast. he goes in, like in-person interview while he's down and sits with him.

And at the end of the show, like, side note with Gary, he's an actor, he does some comedy, he does a whole bunch of different stuff. End of the show, Bree loves like, oh, Gary, so where can people find you? And he's like, yeah, I'm on a new list, a few things. He's like, I'm also on Noster. I can be, you can find me and follow me at. And he brings up a piece of paper. And he proceeds to read the entirety of his N-Pub.

Amazing. And didn't stop all the... And Cameron Penn, Reedlop, who's just, like, straight face, like, standing there, waiting for him finish. It was... It's art. If you get the chance, go find that... Or...

Go find that episode with Gary in the mood. And at least check out... Of course, check out the whole episode. But in particular, go check out that part. It's amazing. That's funny. Okay, with that, we're going to do another segue here. Bevan, we're going to be going to you in just a moment.

We're going to do a quick shout out to our sponsors, of which Bevan has no affiliation whatsoever. But we'll be back in just one moment. Do you want to give a little teaser about why you're so damn bullish before we get into it? Yeah. Well, I think the kinds of conversations that Jan 3 is having with nation states right now is extremely bullish. I know there's three nations that I can't really say that are pretty close to making some moves. I think the fact that a lot of, like, it's really, it's not that.

And if people want to hear them, they can stick through the minute. Cool. Don't give it all the way, Bevin. You got to eat red crumbs. Okay, we'll be back in one minute. If you're enjoying the show, please do drop a like. If you're new here and you're not yet subscribed, please do. So you can come back and hear even more conversations like this.

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You can head over to debify.com to check them out or simply scan the QR code on the screen. All right. We are back in, Bevin, without any further ado, I cut you off because I wanted to leave some suspense, but I'm going to let you continue. Tell us about why you are so bullish, and it sounded like there have been some interesting conversations going on with Jan 3, Samson Mao, Prince Philip, and some, some, some mystery guests. I'm just going to say it's, no, I'm not going to make up countries right now, but tell us more. Tell us more. Please do. Well, I guess the first thing I'll say is that as,

you know, the marketing guy at Jan 3, I really only know about this stuff at like on an as needed basis, you know, just before it kind of starts to go out to the public or, you know, from a package this story up kind of standpoint so that we can describe it. to this person that maybe doesn't understand Bitcoin that well in this nation. What I can't say is that there have been some evolving conversations that have happened last year and are starting to become more real this year. You know, the most notable things, conversations that we had last year in terms of the nation-state stuff was with Thailand, with Japan, Taiwan, Paraguay.

we made a bond proposal to Paraguay that I think it was pretty well received. I mean, there hasn't been any movement on that, but I think we opened some people's eyes as to what you could do. If you see it as a strategic asset beyond even just a, you know, a reserve asset, something that you can do to increase foreign direct investment. I guess if we are talking about Paraguay specifically, like Paraguay is actually a, a, a fairly, in a fairly strong financial state, compared to most of the other countries in Latin America. And because of that, like, you're, you know, you can use Bitcoin in different ways to either help pay off debt by building a strategic Bitcoin reserve and letting that compound over decades. Or you can use it to help bring in foreign investment and increase your ability

you to spend on infrastructure. And so that infrastructure could be a lot, oftentimes we push nations to think about Bitcoin mining first because it's a revenue generating form of infrastructure. But also, you know, you could spend it on road development. You could spend it on hospitals, schools, you know, rural broadband penetration. Bringing things like this to citizens in a country will really, I guess, increase the positive reactions that they have to Bitcoin, whether or not that they understand Bitcoin at all. And so, yeah, a lot of these conversations kind of revolve around how can you dip your toes into

Bitcoin without necessarily doing what El Salvador did with, you know, diving head first off a 150-foot bridge and just seeing what happens. Apparently with middle fingers in the air too. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I mean, there's many, many reasons why I feel extremely bullish. I think part of it has anything to do with, you know, the conversations that we're having with nation states or, you know, some of the work that we're doing with Aqua. Part of it is just realizing that, you know, the structural change from a more retail driven demand to more institution level demand, seeing how the market, you know, changes that or at least has changed. changed since we've seen that change in the structure.

And then also, yeah, like just knowing that nations are talking to each other. They're looking at the U.S. trying to see what the U.S. is going to do. You know, it turns out the U.S. hasn't done a ton yet, but they've said a lot about a lot of things. And so the conversation has started. It's evolving. There are more and more people all throughout the world that are wanting to, to have this conversation, whether it's with Jan 3 or other trusted partners that they have.

It all kind of turns toward, you know, this change and Bitcoin as a strategic asset for all different scales of individuals, you know, corporations, institutions, you know, individuals in nation states. I, a side note, I've got a question for you, Bevin, how much weight would you give the idea that one, Venezuela had any Bitcoin, and two, that should the U.S. find those keys, it will be part of the U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. You know, I don't know. It's all a rumor right now, as far as I know.

I don't know. Maybe someone figured it out. But I did see that. And it is an interesting thought experiment. I mean, there's two things, right? Venezuela has the biggest one of the reserves in the world. if they were smart and they started to save some Bitcoin as well. And the U.S. comes in and tries to seize not only their oil, but the Bitcoin, I don't know.

Like, can they find the keys, right? Like, I don't really know how it's institutional and nation state custody is. I'm assuming that it is pretty extreme. But again, it's, you know, it's pretty new to these nations. So who knows if they're the most read into, you know, how you can hold your Bitcoin in the safest way. And so, yeah, I'm not really sure, but it does seem plausible. I think it is a plausible theory. Did you see any $60 billion liquid swaps in the last little bit over Aqua or no, no?

Not over Aqua, but maybe you should ask Boxer. dream about that. Maybe. Maybe. I mean, you started an interesting way. If they were smart, they would have, well, I mean, they did take what would have been probably the richest nation, like the greatest oil reserves, some of the greatest oil reserves on the planet, tons of gold, all of these different resources, and squander it under a

a horrible tyrannical regime with like some of the worst socialism on the planet. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, maybe that's the disqualifier right there. Yeah. And I mean, like it would be also like counterintuitive. I think to embrace Bitcoin that way, just, you know, the history there doesn't really show me that they have any incentive.

to understand it the way that most people should. So yeah, I'm not really sure. And I can say we haven't had any conversations with Venezuela, so maybe one day. Yeah. The most disappointing thing would be the U.S. finds the keys and then they check it. And all that's on there is a bunch of the Venezuelan Petro. That would have been, that'd be unfortunate for them. Yeah, from Venezuela and stablecoin.

Yeah, exactly. Well, you just reminded me of another reason that makes me extremely bullish. And it's kind of counterintuitive, too, to Bitcoin. There are 400 million users of Tether in the world. Most of these users of Tether are trying to escape their local inflationary currency, trying to use to bank themselves, right, in places where it's really difficult to get a bank account, let alone a dollar denominated bank account. And so if you think, I mean, that's a huge amount of users.

And all of those users could be Bitcoiners, but they don't necessarily understand Bitcoin yet. They definitely don't use Bitcoin wallets because there's only a few Bitcoin wallets that have integrated Tether. Now Rumble is another one of them. But of course, Aqua is, you know, one of those. And so I think part of what we're trying to do with Aqua is to show these users, of tether that there's another way you can you know uh use tether in a bitcoin native ecosystem without net having to touch these sketchy you know altcoin browser wallets um and and use these different chains i mean the nice thing about liquid is that there is no like native token to use

liquid so to use any other chain you have to use this native token so you must own ethereum you must own Polygon or, you know, Tron or any of these other things. But to use liquid, you just need Bitcoin. If I'm not mistaken, Samson was talking about that to me one time. And he was saying, like, listen, we, you know, part of part of the reason for the design of the wallet is to siphon these people away from these other predatory environments and, and handhold them towards Bitcoin. And so, like, you know, when Aqua launched and said, hey, we're, we're going to have

tether on here, but we're going to be able to accept tether from like all the all the shit coin chains. But then when it comes in through a shit coin chain, it auto swaps to being on liquid. And then when you're looking at your balance at the top of the screen, there's always the Bitcoin ticker constantly. So you have your dollars in there and you can like swap some out to like Bitcoin as like savings or like on chain or or layer. too, but it gives people that that kind of trail of breadcrumbs of, oh, I was dealing with Tron and Tether, and then I came in to this environment and everything still works fine. And then I kept on seeing the Bitcoin price over and over as I was using my Tether

wallet. And then I started maybe saving or in Bitcoin or using Bitcoin or migrated to it. So I'd be curious to see over time, how. that kind of how that environment, I guess, stewards new Bitcoiners in. And I mean, I don't know if you guys have, you know, are seeing things in the back end. Like, obviously, for me as an end user that just uses Bitcoin anyways. But have you heard some positive things from people, even just anecdotally of like them being like, well, I was doing this, then the other thing. And now I use Bitcoin. Yeah, I think a lot of it, like I think of Argentina, when you ask that, like, there's a lot of use of

Tether in Argentina. And a lot of the people that are using Tether, like, don't even, they're not like crypto bros or, you know, whatever. They're not like in the crypto. They're using Tether because they need to use Tether. And they're kind of doing it in an underground way. There are these like brokers, you know, that you go exchange your Tether for cash if you need cash with. And, and so it's kind of a utilitarian need. And yeah, we see that like coming into Aqua. And even if they don't ever use the Bitcoin functions in Aqua, I think that's totally okay.

Because like if you think of the trajectory of Tether, even Paulo, the CEO of Tether has acknowledged this, that it's a temporary solution to a problem that will ultimately end up as Bitcoin. And so if anyone is using Tether and they end up using it through Aqua, then eventually they'll kind of see the signal and they'll see the devaluation of the dollar against Bitcoin. Faster and faster probably as decades roll by. And eventually they'll just kind of start to use it because it's just easy and it's there. And they're already familiar with the interface and whatnot.

In all of these other ways to use tether, it's just not, it's very segmented. You know, going back to what Jeff said, he doesn't want 100 apps on his phone with like, you know, 50 different seed phrases that are written down in, you know, 10 different papers in his house. Like that is crazy. You will lose funds that way. But if you can kind of conglomerate all of this action into like an all in one wallet, then it becomes much easier to manage. It becomes much easier to kind of in this transitionary phase of the world to use all different layers of Bitcoin as well as, you know, dollars if you need them. And yeah, I mean, I think it just becomes an easy solution to some of those problems.

Some of the things you mentioned before as well, like asking when LN addresses, those, I know I will not put a date on it because anytime I do that, it turns out it's probably not right. But those are coming very soon in the roadmap. And so soon you will be able to just have an LN address that you probably use on Noster. or any other way you can just hand it out to your friends. This is my, you know, Aqua Allen address and you can send this to me anytime you want. And on top of that, we're coming out with this major UI update that makes Aqua just easier and simpler to use, where we also have multi-wallet implemented.

So I don't know if you've tested this out yet then, but multi-wallet is going to be a very cool feature. It's going to allow you to manage multiple wallets under one app. And on top of that, we'll have, eventually we'll have subcats too. So you can manage multiple wallets under the same C phrase as well. So a lot of the things that we're working on is trying to bring, you know, this whole encompassing idea of just one place to manage your money into Aqua without making it too complicated to use. That's the idea there.

Well, if you need help adding ZAP support to your lightning address, I'll start suggesting it as a wallet for people to use on Oster's. Yeah. Just throwing it out there. You should chat. Love it. Love it. Will or Jeff, I'll leave it to you guys if you have any commentary questions or anything

else in and around. Really, I mean, we covered a breadth of different things here. But any thoughts, comments, questions for Bevin? I've got two. One's kind of a comment and then I've got a question. Just a FYI. I don't know if you see these are happening, but there's a new launch. Now there's been a couple of them.

One was a buck, which is a new token backed by digital credit issued by companies that are issuing this. So it's like the perpetual preferred equities. And then that flows into effectively what's a, they're calling it a savings coin, not a stable coin. and it will likely be relatively stable, but it's something you can compare and should work in the crypto ecosystem where you go back and forth between Tether and Buck for Bitcoin and Ethereum and all these other things. And the really fascinating part about this is it is it provides, like if people figure this out, that provides demand for Bitcoin indirectly through the L2s of these companies that are issuing

digital credit. It's really fascinating. And the benefit is like if you hold tether, you get zero yield. It's stable because it's a dollar. It's like a digital dollar, right? But you don't get the benefit. Tether gets the benefit of any of the yield that they're making on the U.S. treasuries that they hold behind it.

But the fact that that concept flips the script. And now you've got this digital credit instrument that's issued and a balance sheet is backing this coin or to that starts to become really interesting. There's definitely some risk associated with it and depends on like how it's designed and how liquid it is and, you know, the delta between it. But like it solves a problem of some of these credit instruments that are paying, paying yield monthly where you can get yield that accrues like by minute or by hour that you hold that instrument. So that's that's fascinating. So just as an FYI, like I we're probably going to see a lot more of these types of things into the market like this digital credit concept can be built on.

And I wouldn't be surprised to see it infiltrate into like all of these different types of wallets. Yeah. I mean, so Samson proposed the volcano bonds to El Salvador back in 2021. And the idea there was that 50% was allocated to Bitcoin and the other 50% was used to build this geothermal Bitcoin mine on a volcano. I think it was near where Bitcoin City would have been. had that become a thing or not.

And part of the idea behind that bond was to issue that on the liquid network in the exact same way that you're kind of describing. And I think I saw this on Twitter the other day. It's like someone was talking about like RAPT SCRC. Is that kind of what you're talking about? That's effectively what it is. And you can see it as like another piece of collateral. Yeah.

Yeah. Multiple pieces of collateral. And maybe it's like, you know, Bitcoin, STRC, volcano infrastructure. Or any other bond. I mean, I think like most of these countries that we talk to, we, if we get far enough in the conversation where they're actually asking us about bonds, we always kind of recommend that they issue on the liquid network because then it's globally accessible.

You're bringing in money probably from the Bitcoin community and the broader crypto community. And it trades 24-7, right? And it's easy to manage that way. So these types of things, like they're possible right now. They're just not widely used and built and adopted yet. And so really, I think it takes, it'll take like one or two large players, kind of like a nation state version of strategy, you know, a first mover that's going to be like, screw it like I'm going to do this.

You know, we're going to do this. We're going to issue it. And we're just going to test it out. And maybe it's not a big issuance. Maybe it's only like, you know, a $500 million bond or $1 billion. bond and they're just dipping their toes in. But I think it'll probably happen within the next

three years, if I had to guess. And hopefully it happens on the liquid network. I mean, that would be cool because then it would be interoperable with all these wallets. Potentially, what is the, there's a business right now that does Stoker. Do you guys know Stoker? Yeah, they do.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. tradable 24-7, 365, and you can bounce back and forth in between. Yeah. Yeah, that's a fact. Like, that's where all this stuff is headed. Yeah, I agree. You're going to be able to trade stocks on Sunday night at the 7 p.m.

It's crazy that you can already. I'm all about this. Adam is a speculative man, and he's like, hey, yeah, you can get on Stoker and you can be doing this, then the other thing. Adam's always, always ready for the next thing, the next way that he can throw down some coin and speculate on some things. And that kind of leads me to my next question, too, is like a lot of these countries,

I guess, that you're talking to, they have central banks and their own currency too. Like, who do you even talk to? How does this, how do conversations even go? I guess the incentives aren't great. It's good question. Unless you kind of talk into the central bank and you're saying, hey, like, you know, you can bring this into your central bank and your currency might be a more. powerful.

Yeah. So a lot of the times it's if they're public, it's like legislative people, policymakers that are already pro-Bitcoin. Those are kind of the best conversations that we've had because they understand Bitcoin already. Sometimes it's like fixers, you know what I mean? Like people that are just no people. And they, you know, especially in the countries that are more like a monarchy, you know, that don't necessarily have the same form of government, like you know, democratic process and whatnot. So those countries, it's more just like connections. I think that one of the reasons why Prince Phillips is so valuable to us is just he has connections

and people love him because of, you know, one, he's a good guy and two, he's a prince. And so that helps us engage with certain governments. And then, yeah, the other ones are just legislative policy people. We did have a conversation with the Bank of Japan. And so sometimes it is literally the central bank. And you would think like, oh, central banks might be like, you know, against Bitcoin in some ways because it undermines their power. But I think they're curious. They're Bitcoin curious.

And they need to be because I think this transition is inevitable. It's already happening faster than a lot of people have thought it might. And I think it's at the point that maybe it's even past the tipping point. That's maybe an opinion, but that's what I think. Inevitable. Yeah. Sorry, man, I was muted there and couldn't get to the mute button quick enough. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, I'm always curious how much is, is, you know,

because things don't move quickly in that realm at all. And so I think Bitcoiners are just so used to. you know even though everything seems slow governments feel especially slow with this kind of stuff so it can be a test in patience when when you hear like it's you know the things are happening and then it's like they they are but you know something happened and then it takes you know 17 rounds of approval through different people and different all all the red tape in the back end for anything that, you know, come to fruition. So, you know, practice patients, but even still, like, you know, had you told me that, you know, the end of 2025, we'd be, you know, sitting at

80 some odd thousand dollars and, you know, there'd be ETFs and all these things and we'd be, we'd be talking about, you know, in the new year, you know, did, did the U.S. find and steal Venezuela as Bitcoin to put as part of their strategic reserve? I think back to like the early day. Like your neutral. Yeah, yeah. Like I think back to the early days of like being on Reddit and somebody would be like, there's a, this Delhi started accepting Bitcoin and it's like shoots to the top.

everybody's losing their mind. It was like the most amazing news. And it's like somebody held up a sign that said Bitcoin at a college football game and then paid off his tuition. And like it's just like every, every tiny thing was the biggest news ever. And now literally everything is the biggest news ever. And people are bored. Yeah. It's it's what a time to be alive. So I mean, we'll look at these back at these days lovingly and still feel like they were early because it seems like a lot continues to happen. So, yeah. Gentlemen, I'm going to give a little roundout here.

I'm just going to kind of go down the line really quick to get any final thoughts on anything that we talked about today, anything that you want to get out, anything that just wanted to get off your chest that maybe you forgot about or whatever, sum up. and also where you want to point people towards if you have anything that you'd like them to check out. So, Jeff, I will start with you. Any final thoughts? Anything that you want to point people towards? Yeah.

I think the four-year cycle is broken. I think digital credit is going to be a really exciting topic in 26, probably going to double. And the infrastructure has changed. So, yeah, appreciate you having me on. If you want to hear more about digital credit and digital capital, we have a stream actually happening in two and a half hours called True North, the investment grade Bitcoin podcast. And we've been talking about this stuff for about 65 weeks in a row now. And it's a lot of fun. We spend a lot of time diving into the dynamics of everything happening in the financial markets surrounding this stuff.

So check it out. MSDR True North, the True North. And if you want to find me on Twitter, it's at Punter Jeff on Twitter. Awesome. Awesome. Will, I'm going to toss it to you. Again, any final thoughts? Anything you want to point people towards? Yeah, final thoughts. I don't know. I feel like Bitcoin's still chugging along. I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon, and it's going to take over the world.

It's just going to take a few more years, I'm sure. And if you want to check out Domus, we're on the iOS app store. It's just search for Domus. We also have an Android version. We just released Domus.com. We also have a desktop version, Domus.comas.com. It's a tweet deck, but it's notes. Awesome.

Love it. And Bevan, I'll toss to you finally. Any final thoughts? And where do you want to point people? Yeah, totally. I think I forgot to mention one thing about Paraguay. And it highlights a point that you made earlier where governments move super slowly. Paraguay has an insane amount of energy.

They only use about 10% of the energy that's generated within their country. And so they could monetize that with Bitcoin. And that's kind of like the framing that we were trying to pitch to them. But the thing is they have. these international treaties and contracts with both Brazil and Argentina, where they export that energy at extremely low rates because otherwise, like, they can't do anything with it, right? And so getting the idea across that maybe they should break these treaties or at least somehow find a way to like spend or export less energy and mine more Bitcoin, there's

they're going to literally make 10x what they're making from these countries and those contracts. So that is crazy. Definitely turn some heads. But at the same time, you can't just end a treaty like that. And so, yeah, that's another reason why governments will move really slowly. And so, yeah, one of the things that makes me really bullish is nation state adoption is happening. It's happening slowly, but it's definitely happening. And I agree with Jeff, like four-year cycle is.

broken. I think that's the most bullish thing ever. It signifies a structural change in the entire market. And yeah, where to point people to really ultimately just go download Aqua and go just check it out, make a swap, you know, make a lightning transaction, see how it works. It's on both for the Google Play and the App Store. Aqua Wallet is what you can search for. And you can find it on our website to aqua.net. Awesome. You can check out my tutorial too. Awesome. Well, gentlemen, I appreciate you guys being here. This was a great conversation. Do check out all these gents down below. I have links for them. And also I'll say, it's great coming on here, talking about current events and chatting and getting bullish with everybody.

But also, if you're brand new to the channel and you have not yet figured out how to take Bitcoin self-custody, it is very, very important that you learn to do so. It is the backbone of getting into Bitcoin. So please do take a moment. I play a clip at the end of every one of these shows that encourages you to go check out a learn page that I've set up and it will take you step by step with video tutorials doing all of it from beginner all the way up to being an absolute pro. So heed the advice, go forth and become a good little bit coiner with yourself custody. Thank you guys so much.

Have a wonderful rest of your week. I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This was your bullish session. Hey, you. Yes, you watching the Bitcoin price movements and the latest exciting news. It's awesome to stay informed, but the real power of Bitcoin comes from taking control. Don't just watch, take action. Head over to btcsessions.ca slash learn for free step-by-step tutorials that guide you through every major skill you need to know. Plus, full video playlist for deeper dives on any topic you like.

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