On The Brink with Castle Island - Zac Prince (BlockFi) on Navigating Through the Storm (EP.329)

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

Matt Walsh sits down with BlockFi CEO Zac Prince to cover turmoil in the crypto lending markets and how BlockFi is handling the crisis. In this episode:   Is the contagion among lenders over?  Was Three Arrows excessive risk taking or fraudulent?  BlockFi's relationship with Three Arrows Does BlockFi still have 3AC exposure?   BlockFi's plan to maintain all of their products and keep them operational What differentiates BlockFi's risk management from Celsius  Asset liability matching Duration management  The duration of BlockFi's loans  The structure of the interest account product and why withdrawal periods are up to 7 days  Did regulation work to stem any of the risk in the crypto markets?  Shift from a borrower's market to a lender's market  The effect of capital destruction on interest rates in crypto  Why crypto interest rates are going up BlockFi's deal with FTX  How the crypto lending market will change  Zac's message to BlockFi clients and to the industry Content mentioned in this episode BlockFi's risk management disclosures BlockFi fee schedule FT: Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows fails to meet lender margin calls  

Hey, everyone. This is a very special edition of the podcast. This is the second podcast that we're releasing today. I had on Zach Prince, who's the co-founder and CEO of BlockFi, full disclosure. We are investors in BlockFi and I'm a customer of BlockFi. Wanted to have Zach on because the markets are in chaos. So who better to give us a view on what's going on with three arrows, Celsius, just the overall lending market, the impact potentially with regulation coming on the heels of some of these moves. So without further ado, just going to pass it over to Zach with his view on what's going on right now. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis.

The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of Concentive Easy. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Bitcoin. All right. So we are back with our second podcast of the day. It is that time to do it.

We are welcoming Zach Prince. Zach, welcome back to On the Brink. Hey, Matt, thanks so much for having me. This might be my third or fourth or fifth time here. I'm not sure. I think this is a really important time for me to be here. Thank you, as always, for being a supporter of the industry. and BlockFi and for putting this show together that I know so many intelligent people listen to.

I want to say a couple things first. You know, first off, my sincere condolences to anyone, whether it's a business or a retail investor who has been negatively affected financially by the events in the crypto market of the last six weeks. And when I say that, I'm not talking about the Bitcoin price being down a little bit. I'm talking about, you know, the meltdowns and pausing a whole thing. withdrawals that we've seen on certain platforms. My sincere condolences to anyone affected by that negatively. I was thinking this morning about, you know, quotes that that might encapsulate

some of what I'm sure we're going to dig into very quickly on this podcast today. And the one that was top of mind was a quote from Warren Buffett. And it's, you know, only when the tide goes out, do you discover who's been swimming naked? And I think that, I think that that encapsulation. absolutely it's a lot of what we're seeing right now in the crypto market. But thanks again for having me. And I'm happy to be, you know, talking with you and in the audience today. Yeah, I think that that quote is very apt for this time in place. So I think what everyone's wondering about here is just what is your take on the various blowups that we've seen in the market. So we've had three arrows blow up. We've had Celsius blow up. We've had Luna blow up.

This is on the back of just a rising rate environment from the macro perspective that is not great for risk assets. So your point about the tide going out and seeing who's swimming naked, this is where these type of things start to get exposed. So I guess the opening question is just, what is the recap of what has happened so far in the crypto industry over the past few weeks? Yeah. So UST Luna, you know, peg stable coin melts down. It takes down the Luna cryptocurrency with it. Three arrows capital, you know, liquidated by lenders who had collateralized positions with them. you know, and defaulting on lots of lenders who had uncollateralized exposures to them. Celsius pausing withdrawals, Babel, pausing withdrawals.

Voyager announcing its three arrows capital exposure earlier this week and CoinFlex pausing withdrawals. And unfortunately, Matt, I don't, my best read on the situation right now and the expectation that I'm setting, you know, with the board and with the team at BlockFi is that this is not over. I think we're going to be, you know, seeing a pace of things like this happen for more time into the future. And certainly I encourage folks to, you know, prepare themselves or their businesses for that being a potential here. And, you know, look, I think there's some parallels here to 2008 and 2009. And this is some crypto version of that. And so, yeah, like, there's been a lot and I don't think it's over. So I want to start with a couple of these.

So three arrows capital. And I'm not sure how much you can say or will say on this. But obviously they had a tremendous exposure on a number of lending desk platforms. I have come out on this podcast earlier today and asserted based on information I know and that I've been told by people that were in the mix on this, that this was a total fraud, that they were falsifying records, that they were absconding with affiliated venture capital funds, that they were absconding with project treasuries, that there was potentially some wire fraud and bank secrecy act issues going on here. I guess the first question is what was Block Fy's relationship with Three Arrow's Capital and how

were you impacted by this? First off, I would say that I have to be really careful. in terms of how I discuss any specific group, especially in scenarios where there are legal proceedings, you know, actively or soon to be actively taking place. That being said, I think it's, you know, very much in the public domain that BlockFi had a relationship with Three Arrow's Capital. I'm also, you know, happy to confirm that the lending relationship that we had with Three Arrow's Capital was always on an over-collateralized basis. And the reason for that is that the reason for that, which I'm sure we'll get into later, is that that's where they fit into our credit risk underwriting methodology.

They didn't pass anywhere near a level where we would do things on a one-to-one basis or under-collateralized. And I think that we were either the first or one of the first two in the market to proceed with liquidating their collateral. and confirm that we have no open positions whatsoever with three arrows capital. And I think we're going to be able to drop a link in the show notes. We, you know, we're kind of insinuating without naming names, but there was an article in the FT last week where our chief risk officer and others at BlockFi made themselves available and provided some additional commentary, you know, specifically related to that issue.

But I think that the biggest thing we're seeing, at BlockFi might be related to, you know, the Celsius and some of the other platforms pausing withdrawals. One other point, I agree with your sentiment, Matt, I haven't listened to the podcast from this morning, but I agree with your sentiment. I think that there are, there will be details emerging from, you know, platforms that fall down or funds that fall down. And there's this spectrum of, you know, call it like in between Bernie Madoff and a, you know, well-intentioned but very poorly missed risk-managed operation. And you're going to see folks all along that kind of continuum.

But I would agree, I think I'm very much in agreement with the sentiment that you expressed on the pot earlier. So I want to move on to Celsius, but just to put a fine point on this for your customers, does BlockFi have any residual three arrows capital exposure on its balance sheet? No. Okay. Let's move on here. So talk a little bit about just what's going on in the industry in terms of competitors that appear to have chosen to face off against three arrows and others in a zero collateral structure. And that might be in the point right now of halting customer withdrawals. What is your take on that dynamic in the market? Yeah. I think, you know,

I think that there were a lot of folks lending to three arrows at collateralization levels that were dramatically different than where we were with them, including all the way down to uncollateralized, which is what we saw with the, which we saw with the Voyager news. The biggest impact that all of this, you know, these market events, these unfortunate situations are having on BlockFi's platform is that our withdrawal volumes are very elevated. We saw withdrawal volumes in the week after, so not this week, but a week ago, the week after three arrows liquidation started in Celsius pause withdrawals, we saw withdrawal volume on our platform of greater than 10% of the overall balances. And that's a number that traditional banks

couldn't handle. And we know that because one of our board members was a former CFO at Bank of America. And our withdrawal volume is trending down, but this is a massive stress test. It's a massive stress test. And I'm really, really happy to say that every single product on BlockFi is, has and will remain fully operational for our clients, retail products, you know, deposits, withdrawals, retail products, credit card, trading loans. Our institutional lending has been very, very active, you know, throughout this volatessen. And we'll talk more about some implications of that later. But it has, you know, the tide's going out, period. And what makes BlockFi different from a Celsius in a market like this?

And just from a market perception standpoint, as well as a business model standpoint, what makes you different from Celsius? What makes you different from some of these shops that have halted withdrawals? Yeah. I think, I think there's a few things. So I think there's some risk management stuff that we should talk about, some regulatory stuff that we should talk about. Let's start with risk management. We have a page that, you know, until the last few weeks, I don't think was that interesting of a page for anybody,

but we have a page on our website that we'll also link to in the show notes where every quarter we publish a report about, you know, our risk practices, our liquidity management and composition of our book. We'll link to the page. I encourage folks to look at it. Specifically, what are some of the fundamental risk management differences, knowing what we've learned about Celsius and comparing that to BlockFi? Two fundamental ones that I want to call out. Asset liability mismatch and duration management.

So let's talk about asset liability mismatch. Asset liability mismatch happens when you are taking in a liability in a current let's say Bitcoin, and then transforming that currency into dollars and lending out the dollars. So what happens there is you've borrowed Bitcoin, so you have a Bitcoin liability, but then you've lent out dollars and you've transformed it in the middle and you have a dollar asset on your balance sheet. That type of asset liability mismatch is something that fundamentally BlockFi has never done. We are matched in terms of liabilities and assets by currency.

which is really, really important. Second thing, duration management. So you'll see on that page for anyone who clicks on it that our policies are that we aim to hold 10% of all client balance, a minimum of 10% of all client balances on hand at any single point in time. What does that mean? It's just sitting at a custodian or an MPC wallet that our security team, you know, has built. and infrastructure to manage. 50% of our assets are short duration,

where short duration means seven days or less. So on the asset side, when we're making loans, we aim to have 50% short term. And then 90% within a year. So 90% or more of the lending that we do is one year or less. So this duration management concept, if you have something, let's use ETH and Steith as an example. If you have something like ETH and Steeth, if it's held as ETH, you can go in and out, it's

ETH. Steeth, you have to wait on the merge. You have an undefined duration on that asset of Steeth. There's a market for it, but turning it back into Eath one to one is questionable. Same thing for state teeth. I think that's the most easiest example for folks to wrap their heads around in crypto terms, but what's an easy example to wrap your head around in terms of traditional banking terms? Traditional bank, take an overnight deposit, make a 30-year mortgage.

That's a long duration mismatch. And so I think that we have much more conservative. of asset duration or sorry, duration management policies than what we now know other folks who, you know, on the surface level, how to have a similar business model to block five were doing in terms of, in terms of how they managed risk. So there's a lot more conservatism there. And one more thing I would, I would add on the duration management is the structure of our interest account product. Our interest account product is our most popular product. Folks can earn interest on their Bitcoin or stable coins or Ethereum. Now, the terms of service for this account

give BlockFi up to seven days to process a withdrawal. The reason that that's how the terms of service are written is so that it matches with that seven day duration in our risk management policies, for 50%. We have basically never enforced the terms of service on our interest account of seven-day withdrawal timeframes, including over the last two weeks. What we have continued to do is what we've always done operationally, which is where when folks are making a withdrawal,

it gets processed in one to two business days. Some withdrawals get flagged for security reasons. Folks have to go through an incremental KYC check. That's really important in terms of safety. Folks accounts get taken over. And so our security and fraud systems have flags that get flown or get raised. And if a flag gets raised, you have to, you know, make sure you are the person that owns the account before the withdrawal gets processed. So there's our terms of service, which is seven days.

And it also has withdrawal limits by currency. 1 million. We'll link to this page in the show notes as well. One million per week of USDA, some amount per week of BTC. We also haven't enforced that part of it. We're still, even through this period of heightened withdrawal volume, operating the same way we were before all of this craziness that we're currently seeing started. And I'm so proud to say that we're doing that.

So that is super helpful. And so you've been on this podcast. before explaining just how interest works in the crypto market and where does this yield come from. I think that's an important thing to touch on again. And the comment I'll say is that some of the things that I am seeing in this market with Celsius are jaw dropping to me. And that's someone who's actually been in the industry since 2014. Some of the tactics that were being taken to achieve yield on some of these platforms is just

frankly, appalling. How does BlockFi generate that yield? And what is your view on some of these stories that have publicly come to light around how Celsius manages yield? That's a great question. So I think there's a there's a little bit of a distinction between currencies like USD, BTC, and ETH and currencies like Solana, where, you know, Salana, for example, is proof of stake. That's already up and running and you know what the duration is on the staking and unstaking. But BTC, USDA, and ETH are by far, you know, that's directionally speaking 90 to 95 percent of the balances at Blockby. So, so let's just stay there for a second and exclude staking, you know, on ETH because it's, you know, we haven't had the merge yet. On that page that I was talking about, our,

disclosure page, you see three big buckets of things that we do with assets. The first is institutional and retail loans. That means we are directly facing a client. It could be a retail individual using our app, borrowing dollars with their Bitcoin as collateral, or it could be an institution like a large market making firm, borrowing dollars or cryptocurrencies. That's one bucket. The second bucket is just holding the assets at a custodian. You know, we have, you know, for our risk policies, minimum 10% that we want to have just on hand. That's sitting at a custodian or an MPC, you know, wallet service. And then held it banks and brokers.

You know, specifically for stable coins. There's a lot of movement between stable coin and cash. So the funds could be held there. That's it. That's it for Bitcoin, ETH, and USD. The only thing that change is if you talk about something like Solana is that we could be doing staking there, which has a defined duration. What's not on that list? What's not on that list is Defi.

BlockFi, basically the entirety of BlockFi's experience with Defi has been, we did one small test on compound treasury. And we have zero active positions on compound treasury today. contrast that to someone like Celsius, who my understanding, and I mean, you can see this stuff publicly in the news, they lost $120 million in a Badger Dow hack. I'd never even heard of Badger Dow. So completely different ends of the spectrum. We are doing client-driven business where we've K-YCed the client. We know who they are. If they're an institution, they've gone through our very robust credit risk underwriting policies. And so it's night and day in terms of how the yield is being generated between block five

and someone like Celsius. Now on the regulatory front, let's start to talk about that because that's another area where you're different. You've had an interesting year on the regulatory front. You've had the SEC settlement, settlement with the states. I guess the bright side of that is that you have some clarity on product that you need to sort of push forward here over the next six months or so. Now, that's clarity that obviously came at a cost, but it's clarity that others in the industry don't have yet. And so the general

question is just what is your view on the regulatory landscape right now and how that will impact the lending market? I mean, I don't know that my view on the regulatory landscape has changed much than, you know, what I would have said three months ago, which is that there's going to be more regulation. I think that is, you know, long term, very positive for the space because it helps facilitate adoption. I, you know, I hold that view while also holding the view that there are things in, in defy that, you know, may never be regulated and also add value in different ways. But we've always been a strong believer that appropriate regulation is, is valuable when you're, you know, helping to build a new industry. And we've been a market.

leader within the lending category in that regard. We were the first company in the U.S. to get a lending license to make loans against Bitcoin as collateral. And, you know, our regulatory footprint today includes lending licenses at the state level, money transmission licenses at the state level in the U.S., money services business registration at the federal level. You mentioned the settlement with the SEC, which was actually a federal and state settlement where we defined a path for us to register our interest account product as a security, which we are actively working on and moving as fast as we possibly can on because we see a ton of value in that for us and our clients. And then outside the U.S. today, we have a class F digital

asset license in Bermuda. The Bermuda Monetary Authority is our regulator there. For anyone who works in finance, you're probably familiar with the Bermuda Monetary Authority. They're a very well-respected regulator that has made a great effort to create a digital asset framework, which BlockFi is regulated under. So I think we have a bigger regulatory footprint than any other crypto lender. And that's not always the most exciting part of our job, but it's a very, very important part of our job. And I think one of the things that the industry will learn coming out of this event is that, you know, the right good regulation can help facilitate adoption, generate comfort in the industry, you know, prove the credibility of the industry, and, you know, BlockFi will do everything we

can to be a part of that story. So I totally agree with that. I mean, I think the other thing that I just want to put a fine point on is that regulation would not have solved areas of fraud that have gone on in the past few weeks and months in this industry. And so you can have any regulatory framework you want. But if your counterpart is lying to you, you know, what are you going to do, really? So I think maybe regulation will be what a lot of people talk about and that's great. But some of these cases we're just talking about flat out fraud. And look, I mean, Archicose and Madoff, LTCN, like, you know, there's only so much regulation can do.

I completely agree, Matt. I mean, look, two of the names you mentioned, Madoff and Archegos, you know, very regulated, you know, parts of the traditional financial ecosystem that they were operating in. Was there not enough regulation? Were they a fraud? obviously Madoff was a fraud, Arkegos, you know, fraud or just taking too much risk and the need for more regulation

in terms of how much information prime brokers are sharing with each other. Maybe time will tell on that one, but yeah, I agree with you 100% on that too. Regulation is not the silver bullet and it can't stop bad fraudulent actors from being bad fraudulent actors. Yeah, fair enough.

Well, so let's talk a little bit just about what the past few weeks have been. You've mentioned the stress test on the withdrawal, is the fact that your team met every single one of those, which I think is just sensational for the industry and from a confidence perspective. In times like this, I think you really find out what your team is like. So what's it been like over the past couple of weeks? Yeah, I could not be more proud, Matt, of the BlockFite team. You know, there are market events.

that create scenarios where many parts of our team are working, you know, not eight-hour days, not 10-hour days, not 12-hour days, not 14-hour days, but literally 16-plus-hour days in some cases and on many teams within BlockFi to be there for our clients in times of heightened market volatility. And I think that, you know, the team that we have constructed is the right one in terms of backgrounds, the number one background of folks on our risk management team is Goldman Sachs. Florey and I, as you know, came from the fintech lending market, our institutional services team and our finance team and our client service team. They have folks from leading banks, leading trading firms. I mean, I just, I'm constantly just impressed and thankful to the team at BlockFi and all of their effort in times like this.

one thing I would highlight in particular that always gives me the most joy is that we've maintained a 90% plus Csat. That's like a customer service satisfaction number throughout the volatility. I've seen numerous folks posting on Twitter saying that they talk to Alex or Casey or different people in our client service team. And just seeing folks express that and knowing that we've built a team and a company where, through times like this, we can just be there for our clients, period. Makes me so happy. And again, always just impressed with the work that our team is doing. Yeah, I'll let go that.

I think from being a customer as well as an investor, it's just been great to see the team shine in moments like this. You never really know what you got until it's stress tested. I want to switch gears. I know we only have a few minutes left here, but want to talk a little bit just around. What does this do to the rate environment for crypto assets here? I mean, this is just a chaotic period.

Are we going to see structural changes in the lending market around rates? We absolutely are. A couple things I would call out. So at a really high level, two months ago, the institutional crypto lending market was a borrower's market. Today, the institutional crypto lending market is a lender's market. What does that mean? It means that liquidity has been pulled out of the ecosystem. It means that there's, in a lot of cases, more demand from institutions to borrow because of the heightened levels of volatility that we're experiencing, but there's less supply available to them.

And so it's more of a lender's market than a borrower's market today. And one of the outputs of that is that lenders like Blockfire are able to charge higher rates when we're lending to, you know, the borrowers that we're lending to. And that flows through to our clients in our products where they earn interest on their crypto or stable coins. And so I don't know if this will be before or after the pod comes out, but we're announcing today our rates that go into effect on July 1. We change our rates. We update our rates once a month. And rates are going up across the board. Bitcoin, ETH, every stable coin rates are going up.

And, you know, we're able to raise rates for a few reasons. I touched on some of them. Changing environment, we're seeing an uptick and institutional demand, effective risk management. You know, we over the last year have been directionally speaking, reducing rates. We've also been, you know, for the last nine months, running a positive NIM lending book. And we were cash flow positive as a company last month.

So we're in a really strong position because of our effective risk management. And there's decreasing competition. The tide has gone out. There's less liquidity and less competition. And that means that we're able to charge higher rates and pass them through to, you know, our clients. And I'm really excited about that. So I encourage everyone. We'll also get a link in the show notes, hopefully, or you'll see us on Twitter.

Check out the new rates. They're going up across the board. In some cases, you know, like tier three Bitcoin. it's going up 20x. It's going from 0.1% to 2%. And tier 3 is what applies if you have a large balance of Bitcoin. So for folks like you, Matt,

you might be earning 20 times more on your... I'm in the low tier. I'm in the low tier. Yeah, I'm really excited that we get to do that as well at a time like this. It might be a little bit counterintuitive to people that the institutional demand to borrow in this market is actually highly elevated. You know, it's not a retail-driven market

where the price goes down and everyone disappears. Well, let me paint a picture for you. Let's say you're a market-making firm that, you know, two months ago was borrowing from five lenders that participate in this institutional crypto lending market. Today, you're probably borrowing from two. One of them is probably BlockFi.

And the other one I won't say, but you know, folks can guess who the other one is. Let's say you had $100 million of borrowing that you had done two months ago. While those other three lenders pulled back, that probably went from 100 down to 40. So call it roughly a 60% decrease. This is ballpark numbers in liquidity that's available to you as a market maker. Well, as a market maker, liquidity is the fuel to your business. You make markets.

You need inventory. You've got to have capital on the different exchanges. And so what that means is that the two lenders remaining in this example are able to charge more at a time where the opportunities for market makers to make money, which are largely driven by volatility and spreads have increased. So they have increased opportunity, but less capital available to them. And so they're willing to pay a higher rate than they were a couple months ago because of those opportunities and because of just in general the cost of capital and the availability of capital for financing their market making business. I think that's a really succinct explanation. And you sort of touched on the decreasing competition and just the consolidation that we're going to see. notably you did a deal with FTX on a senior secured credit facility.

They've been doing a few of these. So I guess the question is, do you think you'll see more moves like that in the industry? What are your thoughts on what FTX is doing in this industry right now? Absolutely. I think that, you know, we folks in the industry have been talking for a while about a period of consolidation. I think times like these are very logical ones for that. type of thing to happen in a market. I think that, you know, SBF has been really public about saying that, you know, he thinks that folks in the industry should support each other. It's really

important as an industry that, you know, we have as few of these big negative events happen as possible. I still think there's going to be more, but like for the good actors and the great businesses, you know, we should all be fighting together to, you know, help them win. And so I, you know, deeply respect and applaud the work that Sam and the FTX and the Alameda team are doing. In terms of the deal that BlockFai did with them, you know, I would highlight a couple of things. One, this was a deal that this was a deal that was done to put us in a position of strength because we have a view that there are going to be more shoes that are going to drop. and we want to make sure that we have the highest confidence we possibly can, that no matter

what this market does, whatever that next shoot a drop is, we're going to be there for our clients just like we have been over the last two weeks, over the last six weeks, over the last five years. Other than the terms that we've disclosed about the deal so far, that it's a $250 million line of credit facility that is subordinated to our client. deposits and some of the other information that we put out publicly. I'm not able to talk today about any other components of the deal, but we have alluded to bigger partnership opportunities that we see between BlockFi and FTX. So do I think we'll see more of this type of activity?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it's good for the industry for folks to be supporting each other, keeping great businesses fully operational for clients and users of the space. And if you go back to 2008, there were all kinds of things that happened in the traditional financial markets between well capitalized. I mean, you could go back to 1907 and look at stories of well capitalized individuals providing backstops or support or, you know, incremental capital in times of market. to great businesses. And so, you know, I absolutely think that what Sam is doing is great. I think you'll see others in the industry do similar things. And I think it's a net positive for the

ecosystem overall. I totally agree. So just kind of moving forward here, what are your views on just the implications for centralized financial services? Maybe contrast that with DFI. Just what are we going to start to see here in the next few months and weeks? I think I would highlight two things. I think, I think rate curves are going to become more efficient. I think that, you know, different lending firms, BlockFi included, have been thinking a lot about term structure and, you know, how do you design your agreements and your client expectations in a way that facilitates more term structure in terms of financing availability in the market?

And I think that, you know, that process starting to take place will have a positive impact on the liquidity profile overall of the crypto market. You know, the futures curve for Bitcoin doesn't go out that far in terms of like where there's actual liquidity. And so I think you'll see term structures get firmed up. I think that'll mean that there's more liquidity further out on the curve. And I think that's a net positive for the asset class that over time, I think, will reduce volatility.

That's one theme. The second theme is, you know, look, trust in transparency. are going to be, you know, they're always important, that they're even more important going forward than how important they've been in the past. The market is, you know, the market is going to further separate winners and losers, and I think a lot of that is going to be based on trust and transparency. And you can't get trust in transparency if you're not trustworthy and transparent. Yeah, that's very well said.

So I guess in closing here, is there anything that you would say to your customers, your clients, just any closing thoughts on what's happening in the industry and the path forward here? Thanks again for having me. Yeah. I mean, for the industry, I'm still incredibly bullish. I've lived through, you know, bare market events in crypto, maybe like between five and ten at this point. I don't even, you know, I can't even remember. This one is no different in terms of my long-term view for what's going to happen in this asset class.

and whether it presents an attractive, you know, capital allocation opportunity for folks with the right risk appetite. I'm highly confident that, you know, years in the future, we're going to look back at prices that we see over the next few months and say, that was a great time to buy. And that's how I'm thinking about managing my own personal, you know, finances. So that's one. Two is BlockFi is here for our clients in the industry like we always have been. We've been battle tested in the past. We're being battle tested right now.

And we just want to be here for our clients and the industry in any way that we can. Like always, if you want to get in touch with BlockFi, you know, thank you for being a client. If you want to get in touch with us, please ping us. We've got Twitter support. We've got phone support. We've got chat support. Don't hesitate to reach out. we're here for you and thanks again Matt for having me on I think it's a really important time for us to be putting out content like this

maybe we'll be talking again in a week we'll see what happens but thank you for your support of blockfye in the industry I think I think it's been phenomenal well thank you for coming on being so candid Zach we'll talk soon I'm sure thanks Matt