On The Brink with Castle Island - Alex Leishman (River Financial) on Launching Proof of Reserves (EP. 562)

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Alex Leishman, founder and CEO of River, joins us to talk about River's Proof of Reserve initiative. In this episode:  River business update Building their own custodian Why Alex decided to do PoR now? River's PoR mechanics Proof of Reserve versus traditional audit What kind of assurances PoR gives users How does River handle privacy for PoR? Responding to various PoR critiques Boxing What's on the horizon for River Content mentioned: Alex's previous appearance on OTB River PoR on Github River PoR: river.com/reserves

Hello and welcome back. I'm Nick Carter. Today we're sitting down with Alex Leishman, the founder and CEO of River, which is a Bitcoin-focused brokerage. Alex has been on the show in the past. We actually talked about the subject of today's conversation, which is proof of reserves back then. He was expressing concerns about the procedure. Four years on, River is announcing that they have built a proof reserve functionality. and for those curious, this means attesting to the assets controlled and the user liabilities on the platform. We dig into all that. I know many of you have criticisms of proof of reserve. We also cover that. No one says it's perfect, but it's still very good.

Alex is an exceptional entrepreneur, a great boxer, by the way, and has built River with a laser focus for many years now. and I believe that it's one of the premier U.S.-based Bitcoin-focused financial institutions. Full disclosure, we Castle Island are investors in River and very happy with it. Let's take into our conversation with Alex. Welcome back to On the Break, I'm Nick Carter, sitting down with Alex Leishman, founder and CEO of River. Alex, welcome back. This year's second appearance on the show. It's been four years. Welcome back. It's great to be back. A lot's changed in four years.

Has it? I mean, Pursé change, you know, maybe a little bit. You know, actually last time you came on the show, we talked about proof reserves, and you said why it was difficult to implement. Yeah, that's right. Well, what about a little refresher? Tell us about River.

What's the premise of River? What do you guys do? At River, we make it really easy for Americans to buy and sell and secure custody Bitcoin. We serve both individuals and businesses, and we pride ourselves on very good client services and being full reserve and investing a lot into security and soundness

and making sure that nothing ever happens to your Bitcoin. So that's really what we do. Yeah. Yeah, River is kind of a different startup in many respects. You guys have always done things little differently. You know, you didn't really outsource any of the key functions of running an exchange and you've been Bitcoin focused the whole time, haven't been distracted. So actually, I think we'll start there.

Tell us about building your own sort of internal custodial feature and the way the sort of design choices you opted for as you're building river. Yeah. So a number of our competitors sort of outsourced the custody and sort of regulated financial part of the business when they first started. which to allow them to move faster, we decided to take the opposite approach and sort of do everything the hard way and build this strong foundation brick by brick, which means, which meant getting all the licenses to allow us to custody Bitcoin and process payments for our clients. The reason we did that was for a few, there were a few reasons we did that. The number one thing was that I never felt comfortable offering cuts.

to our clients unless I could tell them with 100% certainty that their Bitcoin was safe. And outsourcing the custody function wouldn't allow me to do that. There's just been, there's just too much incompetence in, you know, in this industry. And there's just so many B and C players, building custodians. And you just never really know unless you're running it yourself, if things are being done properly. And it doesn't matter how many licenses somebody has. It doesn't matter how many check boxes from some checklist somebody has. What matters is that the people there really know their stuff.

And so that was really the core of it. And then on top of that, by owning the full stack ourselves, it allows us to customize our offering much more directly to what our clients' needs are, to make our own compliance decisions to, to make sure that our client's experiences as low friction as possible. So, I mean, it's going well, right? Like things seem to be humming along. Yeah, yeah.

We've been growing steadily the past when we started five and a half years ago. So this year was pretty good for us. We grew, we pretty much doubled this year. And the trend continues. It's obviously there's ups and downs with the markets. There's always challenges building a Bitcoin company. company, scaling and automation and, you know, providing the same level of service when you're, when you're an order magnitude bigger is a lot harder. And so we're investing a lot into all of

those things. But by and large, things have been going well. The macro trend of Bitcoin over the last four years has been really good for us. And, you know, it's much more of a institutional asset today than it ever used to be. Yeah. And, uh, You know, it's funny. I mean, I've known you the whole time. We've been on this journey with you. Obviously, Castle Island's an investor. It's been incredible to see. I remember we met Riga, and you told me you wanted to build a Bitcoin brokerage. And here you are today. You know, pretty amazing a UM and a platform that stood the test at time as so many others have fallen by the wayside. I think it takes a lot of discipline to be a Bitcoin business. You know, there's always shiny,

objects to chase and you've always resisted that. I mean, have you, were you ever tempted to be like, yeah, look, we're going to, we're going to list Solana next. Not really. I mean, there were phases where we wondered if we were missing something, especially during the 2020 era where you had these companies like FTX and Block 5. Frankly, just put it only, they were sort of blowing past us from a growth perspective. We more looked at BlockFi because they were U.S. based, and FTCX was offshore, and that was kind of its own thing. But, you know, we had these companies blowing past us from a growth rate perspective,

and we just, are we missing something? Like, how do we do this yield thing safely? Like, what are we missing? So, but every time we started really digging into it, we could just never get there. And so it's not like we sort of are just sort of, you know, dogmatic about Bitcoin and therefore just never look at anything else. It's just, you know, we try to be rational and always look at what else is out there, but the rational choice always ends up with just focusing and doing what we do really well. And so far,

that's served us as well. And you think there's enough wood to chop in as a primarily Bitcoin focused sort of brokerage exchange, like there's still interesting things to work on and build. Yes. They're not super obvious all the time, but, But there are. And we have a huge backlog of stuff, backlog of stuff we want to build and do. And so I don't see that slowing down anytime soon. Our vision is really that the US has headed towards a dual currency era over the coming decade or two where people will save in Bitcoin but still spend and earn in dollars.

And that's really where we're headed. And so as that system evolves, people's needs. needs will change and the services that they need from us are going to keep changing as well. So one new thing this year obviously is the Bitcoin ETF. Actually, I guess maybe was it December last year? Anyway, so the ETFs have been very successful. And, you know, has this, do you worry about this? I mean, now there's a way to hold your Bitcoin exposure with BlackRock. Obviously, it's a little bit different. It's merely financial exposure. You're not getting. getting the asset itself. Has that been like a concern? I mean, you know, a client fall off

if it's just easier to hold in your conventional brokerage? So we were not sure how that was going to impact our business before it launched. We were, you know, it was kind of 50-50, but I started digging into it and was doing a lot of research and I found that, and I looked actually, I looked back at the gold ETF launches. and there were actually some interesting corollaries there and we saw pretty much the exact same thing happening with Bitcoin when the gold ETFs launched

it actually spurred it caused more people to own physical gold it basically just further popularized gold as a store or value or as an investment asset in the United States And so it didn't cannibalize the people who hold physical gold. It just grew the whole market and afterwards even more people held physical gold.

And that's what we saw with the ETFs. When the ETFs launched, we had our best month ever by every metric. And our growth has been much faster since the launch of the ETF. Now, it's hard to sort of decouple that from price movement because the ETF really did also just spike the price of Bitcoin and that just grows the pie for everybody. But I think by and large, the fact that the ETFs have sort of blessed Bitcoin as legitimate is good for us. Yeah. That's pretty interesting. Those early 2000s. Yeah, exactly. Early 2000s for the gold ETF. So actually very interesting given our topic today, proof reserves. So I think when we first invested

with you, I harassed you about this, actually, from what I recall is I've always been a proof reserve advocate. So you're announcing that you're launching that on the platform. Yes, yeah. So Peruvreserves is going live. And by the time people are listening to this, there's a good chance that it is live. And so we will be publishing both the proof of liabilities. So representing all of the account values, all the bad. balances of River client accounts and also proof of assets, proof of control of our cold storage to prove that we have more Bitcoin in our custody than we have liabilities and client deposits. And that is going to bring a new level of transparency to River.

Our goal has always been to build the most trusted Bitcoin brand in the world. And this is one more step towards that. And while proof of reserves isn't perfect in the sense like it doesn't They can't protect you from every possible level of funny business. You know, a company can pull off. It is a net good. And so I'm really excited to me. Yeah, me too.

Me too. You're talking to probably the number one proof of serves enthusiasts on the planet right here. What was it that compelled you to, you know, pull the trigger on this? Was it were there regulatory changes or is it just you felt it's time? let's really take this extra stuff and further advance our credibility with our clients. It felt like it was time. We have grown to the size where we have assets under custody at a level where it is really important to bring the transparency to our clients. and I do think that what has become clear over the years is that trust is like the client the the market is has a lot more educated today than they were a few years ago before they didn't care about being for reserve they cared about their yield that they cared about all these other features they just the market wasn't educator on how important it was to be safe and sound

Now the market is much more educated and cares a lot about this kind of stuff. And so part of it is also just the market has changed. And I think people now will really value, you know, companies that put in the work to do this. Yeah. What's the expression? Safety regulations are written in blood. So I can't even count how many times exchanges have been found to be not full reserve. And I mean, even in the U.S., even like ostensibly credible,

regulated institutions have been found lacking. Obviously not to mention the quadrigas and the FTXs and the Bitfenxes. It's literally an endless list. I found that POR within the industry has, there's been more attention on it post these big insolvencies, your bursts of attention. You're doing it off cycle. You're doing it at a time when nobody was clamoring for it. But you just decided to, okay, now is the time.

Let's do it. because, well, you know, to have things kind of in this industry, right, you have to have the stuff ready before people start caring about it again to actually realize the value of it. And it takes time to build. It takes time to get it right. Proof of reserves in theory is simple. In practice, you know, ensuring all of the operational systems are there, ensuring that it's very clear to users what this is and how this works and getting all those designs right. It's a lot of work. And so we wanted to, you know, we wanted to ship that now. And we also invest a lot in security features and building trust in the brand. And so we've been building a lot of that stuff this year. It's been a big theme for us. Yeah.

So I want to dig into the insurances you get from PR. And I agree it's not perfect. And critics will often point out edge cases and ways in which it could be game, et cetera. And I always say the perfect is the enemy of the good. You know, this is overall net good done correctly. I don't think it does any damage, doesn't do any harm. So I think it does provide users strong assurances, even if it's a different kind of assurance than the sort you get

from a financial statement audit as a public company, for instance. It's just a different type of procedure. So let's just dig into the mechanics of it. So we'll start with the proof of asset side. That's kind of the easy part, I guess, right? is attesting to the fact that you control certain Bitcoin. How do you guys go about doing that? Yeah.

So at River, we have one cold storage address, which makes it very simple and very easy for people to see how much Bitcoin we have in cold storage. So what we do is every time we do a proof of reserves, and we're planning to do it on a monthly cadence, is we choose a block to do the proof of, to sort of attest. And that's sort of like the timestamp for when this snapshot, this proof of reserves is being created for. And we use the highest value output of the coin-based transaction of that block and take seven digits of that as the amount. It's like a randomly generated amount we're going to spend from our own cold storage. So it just there's some sort of, you know, it doesn't look like we just made up a number that would be convenient for us.

And we spend that amount from cold storage. We send it somewhere else to prove that we have control over that Bitcoin address. So it proves that River has the keys to the Bitcoin in this cold storage address. It proves we have those assets. And that can all be verified very easily on any public block explorer without trusting us at all. And then the liability side that's typically more complex, you're doing an attestation for the aggregate, actually really for the, the specific liabilities as well as the aggregate for user funds sold on platform.

You're following the BitMex approach, right? Yes, exactly. And so the way this works is, a very simplified explanation is we're basically publishing a list of all of anonymized liabilities. And so basically what we do is we don't just show a list of all account balances. we do is we actually split those up into so you can't actually see the distribution of account balances. I was going to ask about that. So is the state of the art on that method, is it two leaves or is it with random sizes or is it multiple leaves per client? We do it in a way such

that like bigger clients will have more leaves because we like cap the amount of sort of the size of the of the leaf. So let's tend to Bitcoin, you have a bunch of leaves. If you just have like 100 sats, you'll just have like one leaf. But only you will be able to see like which of those belong to you. Public observers, they won't know like, oh, some, a single person owns all these little fragments. So the point of this is to not sort of show account distributions or reveal client information, basically.

The one number, well, the one thing you will be able to see from this is the same. sum of all Bitcoin balances at River. And the way you know that this is the sum of all Bitcoin balances is that everybody will be able to check that their account balance at River is included in this. So the way we would theoretically, if we wanted to game it, we would exclude somebody's account balances from this if we wanted to try and reduce the liabilities we were displaying. but that client would be able to see that their balance isn't included and they'd be able to sort of raise hell about it. And so there's some sort of social, it's sort of like a social check in a way. Yeah, it's almost like herd immunity.

If a sufficient portion of the population checks, then you can have a pretty good assurance. And if anyone finds a zero balance when there ought to be a positive one, then the whole thing is cast into doubt. Exactly. Exactly. And so, so yeah, that's really the core of it. And while it isn't perfect, because, you know, one of the critiques, right, is you could game this by having like an off the book's liability, some side agreement where you owe this other person Bitcoin and it's not recorded here and they know not to sort of, they know about this scheme. but you know that's also like it would be criminal right and we also get an annual audit as well and we have all these sort of regulatory requirements so doing something like that would be you know pretty hard to pull off and wouldn't end well for anyone here so but at least with this process you know that in the normal course of operations of river we're not there's no funny business which is better than nothing.

Yeah. Yeah, well, there's so many critiques at POR. I've heard them all over the years. That's a common one. There is some kind of off-exchange liability that's not captured, which, of course, that could be true for any business. And I think if you're pairing it with a traditional audit, then the combination is strong.

And people kind of like expect that POR boils the ocean in terms of it does everything. It tests everything. but no, it's just the on exchange, it's just the platform assets and liabilities. It doesn't presume to do anything more than that. That's when you have additional audit functionalities and I suppose regulatory requirements as well. Exactly. And while we have no idea sort of in theory, right, what a judge would rule, it's also possible that sort of, you know, by making these representations and sort of doubling down on them with proof of reserve,

if there were to be some sort of scenario where there was insufficient Bitcoin, you know, it's possible a judge would look at this proof of reserves things and go, well, you know, this was the honest sort of, you know, breakdown of the ownership of these Bitcoin and this like side agreement that they had. Like this isn't like, you know, I'm not going to recognize this. You know, I'm not a lawyer, right? But it's also possible that it does bring some extra protections if that is actually happening. So you didn't want to go for any of the fancy ZK approaches to POR?

No. We take a sort of like approach at River where we try and keep things simple so long as they get the job done. There are sort of more fancy things you could do to sort of hide account balances completely, try and not reveal our cold storage address. we didn't think any of it was worth it because we want people to be able to verify all this stuff and once you make the math super complicated

it's kind of hard for people to really know that it's all correct yeah that's right yeah so I for what it's worth I just verified my liabilities on the platform and it worked so that's a single data point

so maybe I'm the first one to do I think you're the first one outside of river, actually. So I'll admit I use the simple approach to the lot. There's also more complicated way to do the liabilities, like an open source tool, right? Yeah, so we so yeah, you could just like basically

use our website and like say here's what we see what your snapshot was. You go, that looks right to me and check the blockchain explorer to see we have the assets. But if you want to, you can actually download this whole liabilities at the station file and run some open source code that we've published and you can review on your computer to make sure that your account's balances are all included in that.

And what's cool about this too is if you don't trust our code, you can also, it's also compatible with BitNex's code as well. So you have a little bit of redundancy there too. So one of the ways to game it would be if you had a big client that you thought was in a coma or something and would never ever check, then you would just zero out their balance and you would just hope that they wouldn't. Right, exactly. But I don't know if there's anything you can really do about that.

That's an edge case. No, and it would be pretty risky, right? Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. You'd be running the risk being caught. The other critique is what accountants call window dressing, which is the notion of borrowing funds, let's say at month end to make yourself whole for the attestation and then returning the funds, which, yeah, I mean, I get it. Also, that would probably show up on the blockchain.

Well, exactly. You would be able to see that on our, so, you know, you'll be able to see that on our cold storage balance. If you go to Mempool.Space and look up our cold storage address, you'll see a chart with the balance over time. So you'd be able to see. patterns if it looked like we were gaming something. Now there are natural patterns of it going up and down due to client deposits and withdrawals and selling and buying. But, you know, over time, if you're seeing that every month, maybe, you know, like that would be pretty transparent, right? And that's also what like the first thing that auditors look for is suspicious patterns at the end of cycles, more monthly or quarterly. So I always laugh when people talk about.

about that. It's like, yeah, I guess you could do that, but it would be so obvious to anyone that just bothered to look at the cold storage address. Yeah. And, you know, I would say this definitely isn't, you know, the more that we've sort of gone down this rabbit hole of what proof of reserves gets us from a trust and transparency perspective, it really is material. Because what it does is it's saying, I want a lot of eyeballs here. And because we are also audited, that's also telling our auditors like, hey, like, look at this, look at this. We're asking people to look. And really, there's no downside that has.

And it also, yeah, you know, it's only more sunlight. And I think, you know, I used to be like skeptical of the value. And I have to say, like, you know, the more that we've gone down this rabbit hole, the more I'm like, this is actually really what everyone should be. doing. Do you think that there's any risk that there are sketchy exchanges out there that do a ersatz or fake proof of reserve and devalue the entire procedure and kind of ruin it for everyone? It certainly could happen, but I think that can be prevented with the right. The more people who do proof of reserves legitimately, the more we have sort of awareness and education about the different

ways of doing this. And the more hopefully we have people checking this stuff and really raising hell when it doesn't look like things are adding up. So if that's happening, if we are getting more educated people like actually like looking into everyone who's doing this and checking it, then I think that's not as much of risk. It also helps with the kind of re-hypottes, objection to proof reserve that multiple exchanges could be laying claim to the same Bitcoin, because if more and more exchanges do it, then it becomes harder to kind of lay a double claim to the same assets. Exactly.

And inevitably for us, since we only use one address, and this is like, you know, we might get some lack for that, but really it's the ultimate level of transparency and there's really no security risk from putting everything in one address is now once we look at one address, is now, Once we launch this, everyone's going to be able to know that's the river cold storage address. So anyone else who's claiming that that's their address, it'll be immediately clear that they're lying. And those coins are river coins, and everyone in the world's going to know it. Did you worry about privacy at all, or do you feel that that's kind of adequate in terms of the way that you're randomizing the leaves? I think it's adequate.

I don't think this harms user privacy. Already today, if any sophisticated observer wanted to follow river coins, they'd be able to find her a cold storage address. And I don't think it, you know, and at the end of the day, like, you know, the bigger the river client base gets, the more of an anonymity set that is, right? And so really by, you know, you're just kind of, it's almost, you're just like sort of commingling your activities with lots of other people. It's hard to see how that hurts you.

you know yeah the uh i don't know how much you know about audit i mean i you must know a thing or two how do you come i know there's also a bunch of different types of audits too so there's like financial statement audits and there's like sock one and two audits um there's like controls how do you compare a procedure like a proof reserve to like a more conventional audit approach um So our audit, I would say it actually just overlaps, but makes it public and operationalizes the activity that's happening during a financial audit for a company like ours. Our auditors do approve of reserves with us whenever they audit us. So that's already happening.

They're also looking at our liabilities, looking at our assets, and making this prove spendability. Like our auditors, they'll literally say, here's a random amount of stats. I want you send this from the address you're claiming is yours to prove to us that you control this. So basically, we're just taking what we would have done sort of whenever an auditor asks and saying, hey, everyone should be able to see this to operationalize it and do it every month. And basically what this is. Yeah, and it's one thing that makes, I don't think people understand this. It's one of the things that subtly shows how much better Bitcoin is as a financial asset than any other asset

on the face of the planet. I mean, we were talking about gold custodians to the start of this conversation. How do you prove that you have the gold? You just can't. You just can't. It's all trust. There's fake gold ingots running around there with tungsten. That's a real thing. Other commodities actually, it's a rampant problem that you have fake commodities. And just no one ever really checks and there's no way of proving to a third party that you own a certain quantity. It's the same with, frankly, with like, equity claims at brokerages. They frequently have accounting issues, especially there's like secondary lending. There's just nothing like a true proof reserve, whether it's a commodity held in custody to the third party or even securities

in a brokerage account. Just there's no analogy. 100% exactly. And then it's also sort of just even within Bitcoin, it's like, well, if you're going to keep your Bitcoin somewhere, if somebody has proof of, one person has proof of reserves and one company doesn't, it's kind of like, well, it's kind of an obvious choice, right? And this is unfortunately like a actual matter of contemporary importance because there are Bitcoin custodians out there that have, it looks like, run from. fractional reserves or just been under reserve for periods of time and it's just very unclear

how the other entities that are plugged into these custodians have been exposed to that. And this is a very, very real concern today. This isn't even like a looking back to Kodriga or FDX. Like this is a today issue. 100%. There's also something about proof of reserves that I think a lot of people don't realize is internally how important it is. Actually, we've been doing an internal proof of reserve.

process monthly for a while now, sort of not even required by our auditors. And the reason is, I want everyone at River to know everything is good. And like an interesting observation I had about pretty much every custodian that's been running either a scam or just fractional reserve because of incompetence is that most people in the company didn't realize it and weren't asking the right questions. And we have a pretty paranoid culture at River, but I wanted to just preempt all of it and say, like, everyone working at this company

deserves to know that everything is good. They're betting their careers on this. They're risking their reputations on this. And that's an aspect of this that I think people also don't, like, really recognize. That's a very interesting point because I have friends that work at some of these offshore exchanges, and I'll ask them, like, you know that you have reputational exposure by working here. Like, what if it turns out to be an FTX? 100%.

And they're like, well, they don't. And they'll tell them. me like well they don't show me the accounting i'm like well ask yeah that's what i always but they can't i always say i i think i tweeted this a few weeks ago is like if your employer especially if you're working at a financial institution is not transparent with the finances of the business and if you're at a custodian or crypto custodian and they're not transparent with how they're doing things or proof of reserves you need to be asking these questions and if they're not willing to show you that information you should really seriously think hard about working there

Because if you're working somewhere, especially if you have a decently important role and something happens, that makes you look like an idiot. You can't just leave, especially if you have a senior role there, you can't just say, I had no idea. That just means you're like, so you what, you're in a senior role. You don't ask hard questions about, you know, what's going on where you work? Like, well, I don't want to hire that kind of person, right? So I think not enough people think about this stuff. Now they don't, and they're totally insufficiently paranoid about the solvency of their employers. And, you know, it's not just reputational.

It's potential criminal liability. I mean, come on. Especially if you're a director of the company at the company. Yeah, it's great. Yes. It's great. Yeah, as I'm on the board of a number of companies. This is something that I ask about.

So onto other topics. So river.com slash reserves. I think that's the way to go check. So go do that. Help me know that my funds are safe. I need you to do your click through the proof reserves. On River, you've had an interesting year in evolution of the business, too.

Tell me about some of the new trends that are developing over at River. Yeah. So security is a big one. We don't just have proof of reserves. We have some other cool security features. coming. We have something we're internally calling lockdown mode that will ship later this year, which is a way to basically keep your, protect your Bitcoin or river, even if there's some sort of,

you know, even if you get hacked personally, while still providing the flexibility you need. That's definitely something we want to, you know, help people sort of protect themselves as well, even people who aren't really security aware. And then another big theme where, thing a lot in is creating more and more seamless, seamless interaction between Bitcoin and US dollars, Bitcoin and Fiat. I really truly believe where we're heading as an economy, as this dual currency era, it'll take a while, but people are going to, people and businesses are going to save in Bitcoin and spend and earn in dollars. And we want to build a perfect application for individuals and businesses to you know for that world we're seeing a lot of

business adoption a lot more uh basically what we've seen is as as individual adoption of bitcoin grows business adoption of bitcoin follows um business adoption of bitcoin as a treasury asset happens when the leader of a business becomes orange-pilled um and the more people who who become orange-pilled, a subset of those people run businesses, and then the next logical thing they do is they buy Bitcoin for their company. And so really the business and the individual is the same customer. And that's an interesting trend we've seen a lot of. So before I let you go, last time we saw each other, we had a sparring session, and you

kind of destroyed me to be honest because I was pretty new. When are we, are you still boxing? Yeah, yeah, I just did a boxing class this morning. We should definitely do another light session, but you're not take it easy on me because you're basically a pro now. I think you're like three weight classes above me right now. I cut down to 160 for this fight. Okay, yeah, I'm like 190 right now.

Yeah, the light heavyweight. I saw your fight, man. You're a killer. I don't know if I have that in me. You're going to have to. I would love to do another technical spar against you. to see how far have you been inspired to take a fight since everybody in cryptos fighting each other to be honest man i i just no i'm too old uh i'm not we're like the same age yeah i'm just

everyone they you know everyone that gets injured and i i don't know i don't i don't know if i have any um we'll see we'll see i like the light i like the light spar i like a little bit uh you know that that sort of thing, but full-blown fight, I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, I think you're too important to, you know, to be fighting. I'm more kind of disposable. People are trusting, you know, a lot of Bitcoin with the thing I'm running. So, you know, that's true. I can't get punched in the head too much.

You might forget the seed phrase for all the coins. Well, anything interesting to talk about on the road. map or is it a secret? We have some, so I'll just give a little hint. Rivers has been going to become a much better place for dollars as well as Bitcoin. So stay tuned for some cool things there. All right, not divulging too much. Alex, it's a pleasure as always, I guess in four years. We'll have you back on the show in 2028, I guess. I don't know what the world will look like. Looking forward to it. You'll be a WBO belt by then. yeah a bitcoinized world in 2028 and yeah i'm really happy that uh that you guys got around to doing this

um this is we've done so many episodes on a p or i think we've interviewed every exchange that's done it and they haven't all done it right you know uh with real care and you know off cycle the way you're doing it in terms of doing it for the right reasons it's supposed to try to cash in on the popularity of the phenomenon you know like when fdx happened a few exchanges announced it and then didn't follow through or they only did the asset side, you know, and they just sputtered out. So I know that you're doing it legitimately and for the right reasons and super, super excited to see this development. So I'm going to say thank you. Awesome. And you know, thank you for really educating, educating us and educating the market on

the importance of this stuff. Well, thanks for joining us today, Alex. Yeah, thanks for having me.